An Overview of the Wai-It Language

by Zeke Gothedeer

Wai-It (called “Vibes-spicy-vibes-vibes-spicy-spicy” by its speakers) is a language spoken by a group of fishermen in Norumbega, Maine. It functions as a cryptolect that the fishermen only use amongst themselves; they communicate using grunts and head gestures whenever outsiders are present. The existence of Wai-It was revealed to the world in 1986, when a Norumbega fisherman accidentally spoke Wai-It to a visiting tourist who just happened to be dressed like a fisherman. Wai-It does not seem to be related to any other language, and it is considered an isolate.

The speakers of Wai-It are an ethnically-diverse population who only have their profession in common. It is not known where the language originally comes from, how it ended up in Norumbega, or why it became the lingua franca for this group of fishermen who presumably did not share a common language when they first arrived in America. Most of the younger fisherman in the group now speak English as a first language and have little to no knowledge of Wai-It, so Wai-It is considered critically endangered.

Phonology

Wai-It has 6 consonants and 3 vowels for a total of 9 phonemes, the smallest known phoneme inventory in the world.

Consonants

Vowels

/a/ only appears in the diphthong /ai/ and is considered an allophone of /ʌ/.

Orthography

The Wai-It alphabet consists of the following letters:

B, C, E, H, I, O, P, S, U, V, Y

The orthography is fairly simple, since there are only three possible sequences:

• vibes /vaibz/
• spicy /spaisi/
• uhoh /ʌʔo/

Grammar

The grammar of Wai-It is agglutinative and oligosynthetic. Each word acts as a self-contained sentence, and is made up of multiple instances of “vibes”, “uh-oh”, and “spicy” that change their meaning depending on their position in the word. Much like the Amazonian language Pirahã, Wai-It lacks the ability to embed clauses within other clauses. It also lacks adpositions, deixis, ditransitive clauses, intransitive clauses, the ability to actually describe things rather than vaguely hinting at them, and a bunch of other things that every other language has, including Pirahã.

The first segment in every word is a classifier that declares the type of word it is.

• vibes: “(subject) belongs to (owner)”
• spicy: “(subject) is (adjective)”
• uhoh: “(subject) does (verb) to (object)”

The meanings of the following segments are determined by this initial classifier.

Vibes-class words

* The meaning of “spicy animacy” is not yet understood.

** Because the first-person marker starts with a labial consonant and the second-person marker starts with an alveolar consonant, Sergei Sarostin includes Wai-It in his version of the Nostratic macrofamily.

There are a total of 972 possible vibes-class words.

Spicy-class words

There are a total of 324 possible spicy-class words.

Uhoh-class words

*When used in combination with the emphatic suffix, “uhoh” in slot 7 turns the statement into an imperative.

There are a total of 8,748 possible uhoh-class words.

In total, Wai-It has 10,044 possible words.

Sample Vocabulary

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