Berik (Sewan) is a Papuan language spoken in Indonesia. Speakers are located in four village groups on the Tor River, in Sarmi Regency, Papua Province.

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". 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.

Locations

In Sarmi, Berik is spoken in:

  • Tor Atas District Beu Village Bota-Bora Village Dangken Village Kanderjan Village Safron Tane Village Samanente Village Taminambor Village Tenwer Village Toganto Village Waaf village
  • Sarmi Timur District Sewan Village
  • Bonggo District Tarontha Village

Phonology

Consonants

LabialAlveolar(Alveolo-) palatalVelar
Nasalm [m]n [n]ng [ŋ]
Plosive & affricatevoicelessp [p]t [t]k [k]
voicedb [b]d [d]j [d͡ʑ]g [ɡ]
Fricativef [f]s [s]
Approximantl [l]y [j]w [w]
Tapr [ɾ]

Vowels

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

FrontCentralBack
Closei [i]u [u]
Mide [e]ə [ə]o [o]
Opena [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.

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

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"

Notes

  • Jones, Linda K. (1992), "In Pursuit of Discourse Particles", in Hwang, Shin Ja J.; Merrifield, William R. (eds.), (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 (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), , Forbes
  • Westrum, Peter N. (1988), "A Grammatical Sketch of Berik", Irian: Bulletin of Irian Jaya, 16: 137