Nama

Nama (Nàmà) is a language of the Nambu sub-family of the Morehead-Maro family (ISO 639-3: nmx), spoken in the Morehead district of Western Province, Papua New Guinea by an estimated 1200 people (Lewis 2009). Its speakers live mainly in three villages northeast of Morehead station: Daraia (Ghèrayè), Mata (Matà) and Garaita (Ngaraitè). As is common in the area, the name of the language comes from the word meaning ‘what’ (nàmà).

Nama was first studied by Siegel in the 1990s, but nothing was published on the language except for a few examples in Crowley et al. (1995). More recently, an Alphabet Development Workshop was held for Nama (Price 2000). Study of the language was resumed by Siegel in 2011.

References:

• Crowley, Terry, John Lynch, Jeff Siegel and Julie Piau. 1995. The Design of Language: An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics. Auckland: Longman Paul.
• Lewis, M. Paul (ed.). 2009. Ethnologue: Languages of the World (16th edition). Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/.
• Price, Mavis. 2000. Alphabet development workshop for sociolinguistic orthography [Nama]. ms. Ukarumpa: Summer Institute of Linguistics