Tags: Language.
Ma’ya is an Austronesian language spoken in West Papua by 6000 people. It is spoken in coastal villages on the islands Misool Salawati and Waigeo in the Raja Ampat islands. It is spoken on the boundary between Austronesian and Papuan languages. Both its tone and stress are 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 their occurrence in Swedish and Serbo-Croatian.