Maybrat language

Maybrat is a Papuan language spoken in the central parts of the Bird's Head Peninsula in the Indonesian province of Southwest Papua.

Maybrat is also known as Ayamaru, after the name of its principal dialect, while the divergent Karon Dori dialect has sometimes been counted as a separate language. Maybrat has not been demonstrated to be related to any other language, and so is often considered a language isolate. Nevertheless, in its grammatical structure, it has a number of features that are shared with the neighbouring languages.

Maybrat is characterised by a relatively small consonant inventory and an avoidance of most types of consonant clusters. There are two genders: masculine and unmarked. Morphology is simple. Verbs and inalienably possessed nouns alike take person prefixes. There is an elaborate system of demonstratives (words like "this" or "that"), with encoding for distance from the speaker, specificity, and syntactic function. In the clause, there is a fairly rigid subject–verb–object word order, and within noun phrases modifiers follow the head noun. Verb sequences, including serial verbs are very common, and verbs are used for a number of functions which in languages like English are served by adjectives or prepositions.