Language

Menggwa Dla (a.k.a. Duka Ekor) is a Papuan language spoken by around 200 people on the border of Papua New Guinea and Papua province, Indonesia. Menggwa Dla is a minority dialect of Dla (a.k.a. Dera), and together with its sister language Anggor, the two languages form the Senagi language family. While the genealogical relationship between Dla and Anngor is beyond doubt (e.g. the complex sets of cross-reference suffixes are near identical), the external relationship of the Senagi language family remain unproven. (However, 'links' with the Trans New Guinea and Sepik language families were suggested.)

Some of the features of Menggwa Dla are:

• small phoneme inventory: 5 vowels and 15 consonants with an l/r distinction
• complex onsets are common but codas are very rare
• 2 gender system: for lower animates and inanimates, entities which are large and gravity-defying are masculine (e.g. flying-birds, aeroplanes, sun), and all other entities are feminine
• 10 case enclitics and 3 topic/focus enclitics
• 7 sets of subject cross-reference suffixes and 4 sets of object cross-reference suffixes in relation to 5 verb conjugation classes
• semantically empty subject and object cross-reference suffixes (e.g. "it darkens it" = sunset/dusk)
• nominative-secundative alignment of core grammatical relations
• clauses are predominately verb final
• extensive clause-chaining
• change in the switch-reference system: younger speakers use the coreferential verb form as the default medial verb form, and only use the disjoint-reference verb form when the subject cross-reference suffixes are not sufficient in disambiguating the referentiality of the two subjects (i.e. when the subject suffixes are both third person and the gender information is non-conflicting)

Geography

The Menggwa Dla territory is centred around 141° E (the border between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea), and 3°34' S. On the Indonesian side, the Menggwa Dla territory is situated in Distrik Senggi of Kabupaten Keerom, Provinsi Papua; on the Papua New Guinean side, Amanab District of Sandaun Province.

Around 100 km inland from the northern coast, the elevation is around 1500 feet/450 metres. While considerably lower in altitude than the New Guinea Highlands, the altitude is by no means low, and the terrain is too rugged to maintain sustainable contacts with the coast. There are no roads nor navigable rivers in the area; there are three airstrips nearby: Amgotro and Komando on the Indonesian side, and Kamberatoro on the Papua New Guinean side. The area is covered with rainforest, and the airstrips are often not utilisable due to high rainfall. The Menggwa Dla territory lies on the watersheds of Mamberamo and Sepik, the two largest watersheds in Northern New Guinea.

There are no legends of Malay-speaking bird-of-paradise traders (several communities further east between the coast and the Sepik had contacts with Malay-speaking people before contacts with Europeans). The first contact with 'outsiders' were with Australian patrol officers from Eastern New Guinea in the 1940s. However, contacts with the Australians officers were sporadic, and it was not until the 1950s when prolonged contacts with Europeans occurred; Dutch administrators and Dutch Franciscan missionaries from Western New Guinea set up administrative posts in Dla territory. One linguistic consequence was that Dla quickly absorbed a vast amount of loanwords from Malay, the administrative language of Netherlands New Guinea.

People and Culture

There are around 200 Menggwa Dla speakers; the majority of them live in the 5 Menggwa Dla-speaking villages. Despite the remoteness of the area, the traditional Menggwa Dla culture is losing ground to the national cultures of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea; boys are no longer initiated in the traditional way, the last traditional festival was held in the 1970s, and children are more fluent in Tok Pisin and/or Papuan Malay/Indonesian. Around half of the population has adopted Catholicism.

The main staple of the area is sago. Sago starch is either stirred into sago jelly, or fried into sago pancakes. People also gather fruits like breadfruit, mangos and bananas, and hunt animals like bandicoots, wild pigs and cuscuses. There are also fish and shrimps in the streams, but there are no crocodiles in the area. These days people are also involved in garden agriculture and animal farming; root crops like cassava, taro and sweet potato are grown, and chickens and pigs are kept. There are no shops in the area, and it is unsustainable to freight their garden produce to towns.

Publications

• de Sousa, H. (accepted). The Menggwa Dla Language of New Guinea. Pacific Linguistics.
• de Sousa, H. (2006). What is switch-reference? : From the viewpoint of the young people's switch-reference system in Menggwa Dla. Te Reo 49: 39-71.

Photos

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