Ma'ya is an Austronesian language spoken in West Papua by 4000 speakers. It is spoken in coastal villages on the islands Misool

Misool

Misool is one of the four major islands in the Raja Ampat Islands in West Papua , Indonesia. Its area is 2034 km². The highest point is 535 m and the main town is Waigama, on the island's northern coast, and Lilinta....

, Salawati

Salawati

Salawati is one of the four major islands in the Raja Ampat Islands in West Papua , Indonesia. Its area is 1623 km². The other main islands in the archipelago are Misool, Batanta and Waigeo....

, and Waigeo

Waigeo

Waigeo is an island in West Papua province of eastern Indonesia. The island is also known as Amberi, or Waigiu. It is the largest of the four main islands in the Raja Ampat Islands archipelago, between Halmahera and about 65 km to the northwest coast of New Guinea...

 in the Raja Ampat islands

Raja Ampat Islands

Located off the northwest tip of Bird's Head Peninsula on the island of New Guinea, in Indonesia's West Papua province, Raja Ampat, or the Four Kings, is an archipelago comprising over 1,500 small islands, cays and shoals surrounding the four main islands of Misool, Salawati, Batanta and Waigeo,...

. It is spoken on the boundary between Austronesian and Papuan languages

Papuan languages

The Papuan languages are those languages of the western Pacific which are neither Austronesian nor Australian. The term does not presuppose a genetic relationship. The concept of Papuan peoples as distinct from Melanesians was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892.-The...

. It has both tone

Tone (linguistics)

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...

 and stress

Stress (linguistics)

In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...

 lexically distinctive. That means both the stress and the pitch of a word may affect meaning. The stress and tone are quite independent from one another, in contrast to Swedish

Swedish language

Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

 and Serbo-Croat. It has three tonemes (high, rising and falling) Out of all the 1236 Austronesian languages, there are only 15 with lexical tone. There are five dialects of the language in total, three dialects on the island Waigeo: Laganyan, Wauyai and Kawe and one each on Misool and Salawati, the prestige dialect

Prestige dialect

In sociolinguistics, prestige describes the level of respect accorded to a language or dialect as compared to that of other languages or dialects in a speech community. The concept of prestige in sociolinguistics is closely related to that of prestige or class within a society...

being the Salawati one. The Waigeo dialects have /s/ and /ʃ/ where the varieties spoken on Salwati and Misool have /t/ and /c/ respectively.