Iwá-a Tui

Iwá'a Tui [iˈwa.ʔa ˈtu.i] is a language spoken by a seafaring culture known as the Tui people. The name Iwá'a Tui comes from the phrase iwáák-a tui [iˈwaːk̚.a ˈtu.i] (or, colloquially, iwáág'a toi [iˈwaː.ɠa ˈto.i]) meaning "voice of the people".

Iwá'a Tui is a mainly analytic language with few non-interacting affixes.

Grammar

Honorific Speech

Many of Iwá'a Tui's words have 2 or 3 forms reflecting respect toward their referent and give a literary impression. Formal registers include more honorific word forms than informal registers, but still can occur often in informal registers. In honorific forms and formal registers, the phoneme /ɾ/ is always changed to /l/ because it is not seen as elegant. When words have two honorific forms, one is the standard word and the other is the honorific word. When they have three, the third is often used by children and is honor-neutral, but viewed in concept as lesser than the standard form.

Head Order

Iwá'a Tui is mainly head-final, but head-initiality can occur when giving emphasis or importance to a word. For non-verb phrases, this only occurs for one phrase in a sentence, if any, in typical registers. However, in very formal speech, a sentence will often contain many head-initial phrases, particularly for anything related to the addressee, people, nations, symbols, culturally important objects, and personally respected nouns or qualities. For verb-phrases, head-initiality is used much more often in all formality registers. It is more commonly used to convey significance to the event in question. Head-initiality is mandatory when the head and/or dependent are a clause or if the head is respected (in which case, it also is used in its respectful form).