Berik language

Berik
Native to	Indonesia
Region	Tor Atas district, Sarmi Regency
Native speakers	(1,200 cited 1994) [1]
Language family	Foja Range (Tor–Kwerba) Orya–Tor Tor Berik–Bonerif Berik
Writing system	Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3	bkl
Glottolog	beri1254

Berik is a Papuan language spoken in eastern Papua. Speakers are located in four village groups on the Tor River towards the northern coast of Indonesian-controlled Irian Jaya. ^[2]

US linguist John McWhorter cited Berik as an example of a language which puts concepts "together in ways more fascinatingly different from English than most of us are aware". ^[3] Illustrating this, in the phrase Kitobana (meaning "[he] gives three large objects to a male in the sunlight"), affixes indicating time of day, object number, object size, and gender of recipient are added to the verb. ^[3]

Locations

In Tor Atas District, Berik is spoken in Beu, Bora Bora, Dangken, Doronta, Kondirjan, Safrontani, Sewan, Somanente, Taminambor, Tenwer, Togonfo, and Waf villages. ^[1]

Phonology

Consonants

		Labial	Alveolar	(Alveolo-) palatal	Velar
Nasal		m [ m ]	n [ n ]		ng [ ŋ ]
Plosive & affricate	voiceless	p [ p ]	t [ t ]		k [ k ]
	voiced	b [ b ]	d [ d ]	j [ d͡ʑ ]	g [ ɡ ]
Fricative		f [ f ]	s [ s ]
Approximant			l [ l ]	y [ j ]	w [ w ]
Tap			r [ ɾ ]

Vowels

Berik has the common six vowel system (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/ plus /ə/). ^[4]

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i [ i ]		u [ u ]
Mid	e [ e ]	ə [ ə ]	o [ o ]
Open		a [ a ]

Verbal morphology

Westrum (1988:150) briefly indicates that Berik encodes whether the action takes place during the day (diurnal) or during the night (nocturnal) in the verb morphology, a rare case of periodic tense whose markers are not easily segmentable. ^[5]

Sample of diurnal and nocturnal distinctions in the paradigm of the verb ‘to give’ in Berik (Westrum 1988:150, Jacques 2023:5, Table 1).

Period	Present	Past	Future
Diurnal	gulbana	gulbanant	gulbafa
Nocturnal	gulbasa	gulbafant	gubafa

Sample

• Angtaneʻ bosna Usafe je gatas tarnap ge nuin. Tesa ga belim taban, ga jes talebowel.
• "There was once a person named Usafe who lived near the sago acreages. Whenever he finished cutting down a sago tree, he pounded it" ^[6]

Notes

1. Berik at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
2. Matthews, "Berik Literacy Program", p. 109
3. ( McWhorter 2008 )
4. Westrum, "A Grammatical Sketch of Berik," p. 137
5. Jacques, Guillaume (2023). "Periodic tense markers in the world's languages and their sources". Folia Linguistica. 57 (3): 539–562. doi:10.1515/flin-2023-2013.
6. Taken from Jones, "In Pursuit of Discourse Particles", p. 130

References

• Jones, Linda K. (1992), "In Pursuit of Discourse Particles", in Hwang, Shin Ja J.; Merrifield, William R. (eds.), Language in context: Essays for Robert E. Longacre (PDF), Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington Publications in Linguistics, 107, Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington, pp. 127–36, archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-10-16
• Matthews, Delle P. (1990), "The Berik Literacy Program: From Illiteracy to National Language Proficiency", Irian: Bulletin of Irian Jaya, 18: 109–24
• McWhorter, John (21 March 2008), "No Tears for Dead Tongues", Forbes, retrieved 2011-05-09
• Westrum, Peter N. (1988), "A Grammatical Sketch of Berik", Irian: Bulletin of Irian Jaya, 16: 137