Biak language

Biak ("wós Vyak" or "Biak language"; "wós kovedi" or "our language"; Indonesian: "bahasa Biak"), also known as Biak-Numfor, Noefoor, Mafoor, Mefoor, Nufoor, Mafoorsch, Myfoorsch and Noefoorsch, is an Austronesian language of the South Halmahera-West New Guinea subgroup of the Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages.
According to Ethnologue, it is spoken by about 70,000 people in Biak and Numfor and numerous small islands in the Schouten Islands, located in Papua province of Western New Guinea, northeastern Indonesia.
Dialects.
There are a number of different dialects of Biak spoken on various different islands, the most well-known being Biak-Numfoor, spoken on the island of Numfoor. These dialect differences are minor and mostly limited to slight regular sound changes. The vast majority of Biak speakers are also fluent in the local variety of Malay, but not all of them are proficient in standard Indonesian.
Geographical distributions of Biak dialects within Raja Ampat Regency (Ronsumbre 2020):
Sociolinguistic situation.
Despite the comparatively high number of speakers compared to some other Austronesian languages, Biak is still in danger of extinction. Within the main towns, the generation of speakers aged between 20 and 50 have only passive knowledge of the language and rarely use the language actively, instead preferring to use Malay. Younger generations do not even generally have passive knowledge of the language. Biak is only actively used as a spoken language by members of the community over 50 years of age or so and even they regularly code switch into Malay. However, within the villages further from town there are still children who are fluent in Biak. Songs in Biak are also very popular throughout the Islands.
There is a strong initiative to promote the use of the Biak language, with translations of various books and teaching manuals as well as a radio station and a number of church services throughout the year being conducted solely in Biak. Since 2002, there has also been an initiative to introduce Biak being taught formerly in schools on the islands.
Phonology.
Biak has a phoneme inventory consisting of 13 consonants and 5 vowels, in which vowel length is phonemic. In the orthography long vowels are written with an acute accent. The phoneme is very infrequent in its use and some older speakers still realise it as in loanwords. 
The vowel /u/ is the only rounded vowel in Biak; the other four are unrounded.
Morphology.
Pronouns and person markers.
In Biak pronouns and articles are morphologically related, with both situating a given participant by indicating their relative discourse or spatial (e.g. directional or motional) status. This is not uncommon for Austronesian Languages. Pronouns in Biak are marked for number and clusivity.
Free personal pronouns in Biak share their main distributional properties with nouns; however, they are somewhat more restricted. They can be used as a complement of a predicate or preposition but they cannot be used as subjects. In the example below we can see the use of the 1st person personal pronoun "aya" to complement a verb while the second example shows how a free personal pronoun, in this clause 3rd person "i" cannot be used as a subject:
Pronominal affixes.
In Biak, pronominal affixes can combine with verbs in three possible inflection patterns (given in the table below), which are partly phonologically conditioned. 
Due to the person marking nature of these affixes, the need for the presence of a core noun phrase in the same clause is negated. Thus the following sentence is still grammatical without NP Rusa nanine, as the verb has a pronominal affix that gives the same information. 
These pronominal markers are person markers and are found in the final position of the noun phrase they determine. They attach to verbs along with a specifier that attaches after the pronominal affix; due to their distribution properties these markers should be considered clitics.
There are two specificity markers, -"ya" and –"i", where –"ya" can be used in all positions and -"i" is restricted to positions before pauses. In the example below the article attaches to the verb "vebaya", rather than the verb "ifrúr" because it is the final verb in the noun phrase headed by "for".
Nonspecificity, which refers to entities that do not yet exist in this world, or is used to question or deny the existence of an entity, is marked with the articles –"o" for singular and –"no" for plural noun phrases. This is shown in the examples below: 
Non-specific
Specific
Demonstratives.
• Deictic nouns.
Deictic nouns are formed by applying the formative "di" 'place' at the position preceding demonstratives, as illustrated by "di-pur-wu" 'place-back-over.there' and "di-ne" 'place-here.'
Possession.
Similar to other Austronesian languages, Biak makes a grammatical distinction between alienable and inalienable for possession.
Alienable possession.
In alienable possession, a possessive pronominal is formed with the possessive marker ‘ve’ to signify the person, number and gender of the possessor, and is followed by a pronominal article marking the gender and number of the possessed. The pronominal article contains the specificity markers ‘-i’ and ‘-ya’, with ‘-i’ being used only in pre-pausal positions. The following table illustrates the possessive pronominal construction.
Typically, Biak follows a possessor-possessum structure for alienable possessive construction, with the possessive pronominal in the adnominal position:
However, alienable possession can also be formed in the
order of possessum-possessor, though this is much less frequent:
Inalienable possession.
Inalienable possessive construction differs from alienable in that there is no system of pronominal possessives, only a set of affixes located on the possessum. In contrast to alienable possession, inalienable possession can only take the order of possessor-possessum. Biak contains three subsets of inalienability: body parts, Kinship, and locational.
Body parts.
Not all body parts are considered inalienable. Those that are form the stem words from which to derive other body parts through the method of compounding. For example, the alienable ‘knee’ is formed through the inalienable stem ‘"we"’ (leg) and the compounding ‘"pur"’ (back) to form ‘"wepur"’. Possessive construction for alienable body parts follows the same pattern as other alienable terms. The inflectional system for inalienable body parts is as follows:
Unusual for Austronesian languages of the area, Biak contains a partial prefix system for inflecting inalienable body parts. For the plural forms, suffix ‘-s’ reflects plurality and animateness of possessor and suffix ‘na’ expresses plurality and inaninameteness of the possessum. As stated above, inalienable possession is formed via a possessor-possessum structure: 
Kinship terms.
Similarly to body parts, not all kinship terms are inalienable. The alienable kinship terms are formed through the same compounding method as alienable body parts, and follow the same possessive construction rules as other alienable terms. This table illustrates the inflectional system for inalienable kinship words:
All nouns that follow the table's procedure have an
idiosyncratic form for the first person, using a shorter term for the second
and third person. (REF pg. 244) Here is an example of the usage of inalienable
kinship inflection:
Locational nouns.
Locational nouns are the last distinction of inalienability found in Biak. Locational nouns refer to locations that are ‘inherently connected to an entity’. For example, a tree in biak is referred to as having an ‘upper part’ and a ‘lower part’, and a canoe a ‘front’, a ‘middle’ and a ‘back’. The following table exhibits the inflectional system for inalienable locational nouns:
The suffix ‘-n’ expresses the plurality and inanimateness of
the possessum (REF pg. 250). The locational noun possessive structure is illustrated in this example:
Negation.
Biak distinguishes between factual and imperative negation (prohibitive). The marker for factual negation is "va". For prohibitive it is "awer".
Factual negation: "va".
The negator "va" occurs clause-finally in intransitive and transitive clauses.
Intransitive
Transitive
In clauses with non-core arguments, "va" follows directly the argument it negates.
"Va" is also used to negate nominal clauses. 
Factual negation in complex clauses.
In complex clauses with "fa", a conjunction expressing result, it seems that the negator "va" always occurs last in the sentence. In the corpus of spontaneous speech collected by van den Heuvel, there are no examples with "va" appearing at the end of the first clause.
In other complex clauses the negator may follow the first or final clause.
with "bukan".
"Bukan" is a loan from Malay/Indonesian. In Indonesian, the use of "bukan", outside its function of negating noun phrases, expresses emphasis. The use of "bukan," in Biak also appears to express emphasis – in the examples given by van den Heuvel, it use occurs when a contrast is given. "Bukan" is used in combination with "va". "Bukan" precedes the first verb and "va" is in its usual place at the end of the clause.
Imperative negation: "awer".
The prohibitive marker "awer" is used to negate arguments in 1st, 2nd and 3rd person.
1stperson
2nd person
3rd person
Other Negators.
To express ‘not yet’, Biak uses the marker "vanim"/"vaim". For ‘not any more’ "wer va" is used.
Typological perspectives.
In Austronesian Languages, the negator commonly precedes the predicate. So Biak, with clause final negation, is atypical in this feature. Clause final negation however, is a common feature in the region of the Eastern Bird's Head Peninsula, in both Austronesian and Papuan languages. It appears to be of Papuan origin.