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Yapese language

 

 
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Yapese language
 
 
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Yapese is a language spoken by 6,600 people on the island of Yap
YAP

Yet Another Previewer or Yet Another Prolog are two document previewing applications and one Prolog compiler often referred to as YAP....
 (Federated States of Micronesia
Federated States of Micronesia

The Federated States of Micronesia is an island nation located in the Pacific Ocean, north of Papua New Guinea. The country is a sovereign state in Associated state with the United States....
).

It belongs to the Austronesian languages
Austronesian languages

The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia....
, more specifically to the Oceanic languages
Oceanic languages

The Oceanic languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, containing approximately 450 languages. The area occupied by speakers of these languages includes Polynesia as well as much of Melanesia and Micronesia....
. It has been suggested that Yapese may be one of the Admiralty Island languages
Admiralty Island languages

The family of Admiralty Island languages is a subgroup of the Oceanic languages. It consists of 31 languages....
, though Ethnologue
Ethnologue

Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International , a Christianity linguistics service organization, which studies lesser-known languages, primarily to provide the speakers with Bibles, in their native language....
 lists it as a language isolate within the Oceanic languages.

The glottal stop
Glottal stop

The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound which is used in many Speech communication languages....
 is a leading feature of Yapese. Words beginning with a vowel letter (with a few grammatical exceptions) begin with a glottal stop.






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Yapese is a language spoken by 6,600 people on the island of Yap
YAP

Yet Another Previewer or Yet Another Prolog are two document previewing applications and one Prolog compiler often referred to as YAP....
 (Federated States of Micronesia
Federated States of Micronesia

The Federated States of Micronesia is an island nation located in the Pacific Ocean, north of Papua New Guinea. The country is a sovereign state in Associated state with the United States....
).

It belongs to the Austronesian languages
Austronesian languages

The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia....
, more specifically to the Oceanic languages
Oceanic languages

The Oceanic languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, containing approximately 450 languages. The area occupied by speakers of these languages includes Polynesia as well as much of Melanesia and Micronesia....
. It has been suggested that Yapese may be one of the Admiralty Island languages
Admiralty Island languages

The family of Admiralty Island languages is a subgroup of the Oceanic languages. It consists of 31 languages....
, though Ethnologue
Ethnologue

Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International , a Christianity linguistics service organization, which studies lesser-known languages, primarily to provide the speakers with Bibles, in their native language....
 lists it as a language isolate within the Oceanic languages.

The glottal stop
Glottal stop

The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound which is used in many Speech communication languages....
 is a leading feature of Yapese. Words beginning with a vowel letter (with a few grammatical exceptions) begin with a glottal stop. Adjacent vowels have the glottal stop between them. There are many word-final glottal stops.

Written Yapese uses Latin script. In Yapese spelling as practised until the 1970s, the glottal stop was not written with an explicit character. A word-final glottal stop was represented by doubling the final vowel letter. Glottalisation of consonants was represented with an apostrophe. In the 1970s an orthography was created which uses double vowel letters to represent long vowels; and because of the ambiguity that would occur if the glottal stop was not written, the glottal stop was written with the letter 'q'. This new orthography using the letter 'q' is not universally in use, but many works and maps about Yap represent place names using the orthography and contain amounts of the letter 'q' that are likely to be puzzling to persons not familiar with the language and the new orthography.

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