Bukawa is spoken by about 12,000 people on the coast of the Huon Gulf, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. The most common spelling of the name in both community and government usage is Bukawa, even though it comes from the Yabem language, which served as a church and school lingua franca in the coastal areas around the Gulf for most of the 20th century. This ethnonym, which now designates Bukawa-speakers in general, derives from the name of a prominent village Bugawac at Cape Arkona in the center of the north coast. Ethnologue notes that 40% of Bukawa speakers are monolingual. This claim is hard to credit unless one discounts both Tok Pisin, the national language of Papua New Guinea, and Yabem, the local Lutheran mission lingua franca. The anthropologist Ian Hogbin, who did fieldwork in the large Bukawa-speaking village of Busama on the south coast shortly after World War II, found that everyone was multilingual in three languages: Tok Pisin, Yabem, and their village language.
Dialects
There are four dialects. Geographical coordinates are also provided for each village.
Bukawa distinguishes the eight vowel qualities. The central mid vowel is rounded, while the low vowel is unrounded.
Front
Central
Back
High
i
u
Upper mid
ê
ô
Lower mid
e
ö
o
Low
a
Consonants (orthographic)
Bukawa has the largest consonant inventory among the Austronesian languages of mainland New Guinea. Glottal stop, written with a c as in Yabem, is only distinctive at the end of syllables. The only other consonants that can occur syllable-finally are labials and nasals: p, b, m, ŋ. Syllable-structure constraints are most easily explained if labialized and prenasalized consonants are considered unit phonemes rather than clusters. The distinction between voiced and voiceless laterals and approximants is unusual for Huon Gulf languages.
Vowels are further distinguished by high or low pitch. The latter is marked orthographically by a grave accent. These distinctions in tone are thus based on register tone, not contour tone as in Mandarin Chinese. Register tone contrasts are a relatively recent innovation of the North Huon Gulf languages. While tone is somewhat predictable in Yabem, where low tone correlates with voiced obstruents and high tone with voiceless obstruents, Bukawa has lost that correlation. Nor does Bukawa tone correlate predictably with Yabem tone. Compare Yab. low-tone awê 'woman' and Buk. high-tone awhê 'woman', both presumably from POc *papine.
Contrastive nasalization
Final syllables appear to show distinctive nasal contrasts. Anticipation of final nasal consonants causes final vowels to nasalize, even when the final nasal consonant is elided in actual speech. Anticipation of nonnasal codas on final syllables, on the other hand, has caused systematic stopping of syllable-initial nasals, creating a class of prenasalized voiced obstruents that correspond to simple nasals in Yabem, as in the final seven examples in the following table.
Yabem
Bukawa
Gloss
eŋ
iŋ ~ ĩ
'he/she/it'
gamêŋ
gameŋ ~ gamẽ
'place'
ŋapaŋ
ŋapaŋ ~ ŋapã
'always'
moac
mboc
'snake'
nip
ndip
'coconut'
ŋac
ŋgac
'man'
anô
andô
'true'
samob
sambob
'all'
ŋa-kana
ŋa-ganda
'sweet'
ŋa-têmui
ŋa-dômbwi
'dirty'
Morphology
Pronouns and person markers
Free pronouns
Genitive pronouns
The short, underdifferentiated genitive forms are often disambiguated by adding the free pronoun in front.
Person
Singular
Plural
Dual
1st person inclusive
neŋ
neŋ
1st person exclusive
neŋ ~ aneŋ
mba
mba
2nd person
nem
nem
nem
3rd person
ndê
si
si
Numerals
Traditional counting practices started with the digits of one hand, then continued on the other hand, and then the feet to reach '20', which translates as 'one person'. Higher numbers are multiples of 'one person'. Nowadays, most counting above '5' is done in Tok Pisin. As in other Huon Gulf languages, the short form of the numeral 'one' functions as an indefinite article.
Numeral
Term
Gloss
1
tigeŋ / daŋ
'one'
2
lu
'two'
3
tö
'three'
4
hale
'four'
5
amaŋdaŋ / limdaŋ
'hand-one'
6
amaŋdaŋ ŋandô-tigeŋ
'hand-one fruit-one'
7
amaŋdaŋ ŋandô-lu
'hand-one fruit-two'
8
amaŋdaŋ ŋandô-tö
'hand-one fruit-three'
9
amaŋdaŋ ŋandô-hale
'hand-one fruit-four'
10
amaŋlu / sahuc
'hands-two / ten'
15
sahuc ŋa-lim
'ten its-five'
20
ŋgac sambuc daŋ
'man whole one'
60
ŋgac sambuc tö
'man whole three'
Names
Like most of the languages around the Huon Gulf, Bukawa has a system of birth-order names. The seventh son is called "No Name": se-mba 'name-none'. Compare Numbami.
