page_title: Wandamen language
section_title: Glide Phonotactics
hierarchical_section_title: Wandamen language / Phonology / Phonotactics / Glide Phonotactics
caption_attribution_description: English: A flowchart of Wamesa (Wandamen) morphophonological processes which reduce and produce consonant clusters. Based on data from Gasser 2014.
context_page_description: Wamesa is an Austronesian language of Indonesian New Guinea, spoken across the neck of the Doberai Peninsula or Bird's Head. The language is often called Wandamen in the literature; however, several speakers of the Windesi dialect have stated that 'Wandamen' and 'Wondama' refer to a dialect spoken around the Wondama Bay, studied by early missionaries and linguists from SIL. They affirm that the language as a whole is called 'Wamesa', the dialects of which are Windesi, Bintuni, and Wandamen. While Wamesa is spoken in West Papua, Wamesa is not a Papuan language but rather a SHWNG language.
  Wamesa is one of the approximately 750 languages of Indonesia. There are currently 5,000-8,000 speakers of Wamesa. While it was historically used as a lingua franca, it is currently considered to be an under-documented, endangered language. This means that fewer and fewer children have an active command of Wamesa. Instead, Papuan Malay has become increasingly dominant in the area.
context_section_description: There are no underlying glides in Wamesa, [j] and [w] are allophones of the vowel phonemes /i/ and /u/. This phonetic alternation is obligatory, permitted, or prohibited, depending upon the environment.
  High vowels must become glides word-initially preceding a vowel or intervocalically. They may optionally become glides when adjacent to a single vowel. Finally, high vowels never become glides between two consonants, depriving the syllable of a nucleus. Nor do glides appear word-initially preceding a consonant or word-finally following a consonant, in which case the syllable structure would be at odds with the Sonority Sequencing Principle.
caption: Flow Chart of Consonant Cluster Phonotactics
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