Maybrat

Maybrat, also called Ayamaru after its principal dialect, is a Papuan language of the central Bird's Head Peninsula in Southwest Papua, spoken most densely around the Ayamaru Lakes. No relationship to any other language has been demonstrated, so it is usually treated as a language isolate.

The name Maybrat combines mai, sound or speech, with Brat, the hill near the village of Semetu, so the word means the speech of Brat.

The Maybrat people live by hunting, fishing and swidden agriculture in scattered homesteads. While the Vogelkop coasts were drawn into the Sultanate of Tidore's tribute network from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and Luís Vaz de Torres's Spanish ships passed in 1606, the lake-studded Maybrat interior remained effectively beyond outside rule, its many dialects carried on in small, self-sufficient kin groups.