Ogea language

Ogea
Erima
Native to	Papua New Guinea
Region	Madang Province
Native speakers	700
Language family	Trans–New Guinea Madang Rai Coast Erima–Duduela Ogea
Language codes
ISO 639-3	eri

Ogea [aka Erima] is a Papuan language spoken by approximately 700 people living in an area 18 kilometers south of the town of Madang, in the Madang Province of Papua New Guinea.

Ogea people

The Ogea live in the four villages of Garima, Dogia, Balama, and Erima, bounded by the Gogol and Yawor rivers, and Astrolabe Bay. Ethnically, the Ogea are Melanesians. It is an Austronesian language and contains a number of non-Austronesian loan words, reflecting contact with languages of that family. The first recorded contact with the Ogea by a European was by the Russian scientist, Nicholai Nicholaevich Miklukho-Maklai, who describes visits to several Ogea villages between 1871 and 1883 in his diary. Ogea has at least one Russian loan-word, "sapora", 'axe, hatchet', evidence perhaps that Miklukho-Maklai introduced metal to the Ogea.

Language characteristics

Phonemically, Ogea has a 15 vowel system with 17 consonants. Syntactically, Ogea is a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) language, with adjectives following nouns, and deictics following adjectives — the reverse of English.

Morphologically, Ogea is a highly inflected, suffixing language, with most of the complexity occurring with verbs. There are over 100 basic verbal suffixes, the number of which is significantly multiplied by allomorphic variants. Ogea sentences are often composed of chains of verbs, with suffixes indicating sentence medial versus final positions. Ogea verbs encode inter-clausal temporality (temporal succession—one action occurs following another—and temporal overlap—actions occur simultaneously). They also encode switch reference. Switch reference indicates whether the referents of the clause in question are referents in the following clause.

It is useful to classify Ogea verbal suffixes into two major categories: endocentric and exocentric, following the lead of Staalesen and Wells. Endocentric suffixes occur between the verb root and the exocenter. Endocentric suffixes include manner, object, and benefactive suffixes, among others. The same set of endocentric suffixes are used with varying sets of exocentric suffixes. The endocenter is composed of the verb root plus the endocentric suffixes. Exocentric suffixes encode inter-clausal temporality, tense, mood, subject, and switch reference. They are termed exocentric because they may contain suffixes that relate to the clause that follows. That is, the inter-clausal temporality and switch reference relate the current clause to the one that follows it.