can be written as y and w instead of i and u. The diphthongs are: ei/ey — sei, sey 'there' iu/iw — biuni, biwni 'kookoobuura, kingfisher' œi/œy — bœi, bœy 'coconut frond' eu/ew — seu, sew 'belonging to there' ai/ay — Saibai, Saybay 'Saibai' œu/œw — kœubu, kœwbu 'battle, war' òi/oy — òi, oy 'hoy!, hey!' (reply to a call, vocative particle) au/aw — kaub, kawb 'tiredness' ui/uy — mui, muy 'fire' ou/ow — berou, berow 'of a/the rib' Grammar Nominal morphology Where the morphology is concerned, the language is somewhere along the continuum between agglutinative and fusional. Nominals have the following cases: nominative, accusative, instrumental (subsumes ergative), dative (subsumes allative, purposive), ablative (subsumes elative, avoidative), specific locative, nonspecific locative (subsumes perlative and comitative) and global locative. Nominals also have the following derived forms: privative, similative, resultative and proprietive, which also forms the noun nominative-accusative plural. All stems end in a vowel or a semi-vowel, except for a few monosyllables ending in -r and -l (which includes the very few reduplicated words, like tharthar 'boiling, seething', as well as ngipel 'you ' [a compound of ngi 'you singular' and -pal 'two']). For many nouns the surface nominative(-accusative) undergoes a final stem-vowel deletion rule; in the Kalaw Lagaw Ya dialect the rule results in final devoiced vowels accompanied by main vowel lengthening. There are three numbers, singular, dual and plural. Singular and dual are the same form in all nominals except the personal pronouns. Furthermore, the plural is only distinguished in the nominative-accusative — except for the personal pronouns, where the difference in number is shown by the stem. There are two nominal classes, Common Nominals (common nouns, demonstratives, locative/temporal/etc. adverbs) and Proper Nomals (Proper names [personal names, boat names, emotive kinship terms], pronouns). The major difference between the two classes are 1) semantic — Proper nominals have pronominal characteristics, and, 2) declensional, for example Proper Nominals have one locative case rather than the three of Common Nominals. Common Nominal declensions Note that the following are in the Kalau Kawau Ya dialect. Irregular nouns There are few irregular nouns, the most common being: ai 'food', ya 'speech, language, message, etc.', li 'basket', lu 'mound, bump, hump' (instrumental aidu, yadu, lidu, ludu; specific locative/proprietive-plural aidai/aide, yadai, lidai, ludai) KKY na, KLY naawu, KulY/KY nawu 'song'; KKY yu 'drying rack, cooking rack' (other dialects nuuwa, nu); specific locative/proprietive-plural KKY nathai, KLY/KY nawul, KulY