Oksapmin love poem
Galas Tan
Gue naknah yoh halas tan ka pat
Yohyoh nohe pianap ponap ponap paham meng
Yahetin loloha yoh kapkap bas hapat mulo
Nohe paham meng mok pepe, noh gonong bapalnap nah
→ French poem ←
Oksapmin language
There will be about 9,000 people who could understand this lovely translation of my poem in the Oksapmin language.
Oksapmin is an indigenous language of Papua New Guinea, probably related to the Ok and Trans-New Guinea languages, (some consider it isolated).
It is spoken in the province of Sandaun, in the Oksapmin and Telefomin sub-districts, north to the Om River, and east to the Strickland River.
It includes several dialectal variations that can cause problems of mutual understanding. It can be separated into two subsets, upper and lower-oksapmin. This translation is in the Lower Oksapmin language.
The two main dialects are distinct enough to pose problems of mutual intelligibility.
If this language is not taught in schools, in Oksapmin villages, it is used in first intention by the community. Also, currently, Oksapmin is considered a stable language.
It is the Telefomin, a neighboring people, who call them Oksapmin, and would have given this name to their ethnic group and to their language.
If the Bimin, the Ok language, spoken by their southern neighbors the Bimins, has identical words, according to the villages their percentage seems to vary.
This percentage variation seems to indicate that the relationship between the two languages is only linked to borrowings, resulting from frequent intermarriage between the two peoples.