Nen is a Yam language spoken in the Bimadbn village in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea, with 250 speakers as of a 2002 SIL survey. It is situated between the speech communities of Nambu and Idi. Nen has unusual lexicalization patterns in its verbs. It has very few intransitive verbs, and where some verbs would be intransitive in most other languages, Nen has a class of morphologically "middle" verbs in their place. Many of the few intransitive verbs that Nen does have are positional verbs, which refer to spatial positions and postures.
Phonology
Nen phonemic inventory:
Labial
Alveolar
Palatal
Velar
Labiovelar
Stop
b
d
ɡ
g͡b
Voiceless stop
p
t
k
k͡p
Prensasalized
ᵐb
ⁿd
ᵑɡ
Nasal
m
n
ɲ
ŋ͡m
Fricative
s
z
Prensasalized
ⁿz
Approximant
r, l
j
w
/h/ occurs rarely in a few interactional and deictic words.
;Vowels: i, ɪ, e, æ, a,, o, u
/ã, ẽ/ occur rarely in a few interactional and deictic words.
Morphology
Number
The realization of different grammatical meanings of Number in the noun depends on the syntactic function and case marking. The noun in the dative overtly differentiates 4 grammatical meaning of number: singular, dual, paucal and plural; the noun in the oblique shows singular ~ dual ~ paucal/plural opposition, while the ergative− singular ~ dual/paucal ~ plural, and the noun in absolutive cannot be distinguished according to number.
Direction
The verb expresses three grammatical meaning of motion: neutral − /Ø-/, towards speaker /n-/, and away from speaker /ng-/: n-Ø-armbte 'he is ascending' ~ n-n-armbte 'he is coming up ~ n-ng-armbte 'he is going up.
According to indexing, the verbs can be either prefixing or ambifixing. In the transitive predicate, a verbal prefix expresses patient and a verbal suffix − actor. There are several types of valency pattern in Nen: 1. Basically monovalent pattern
3. Trivalent pattern The arguments get the following case marking: the subject − ergative, the direct object − absolutive, and the indirect object − dative. In a trivalent predicate, the indirect object argument is cross-referenced in the verb by the undergoer prefix.
Causative
The causative is got by the adding of the meaning 'cause through sustained contact ' to the middle verbs. Prefix /wa-/ in the verb expresses the meaning and the causer and causee are reflected by the ergative and absolutive cases, respectively.
