Kazukuru is an extinct language that was once spoken in New Georgia,

Solomon Islands Solomon Islands is an island country consisting of six major islands and over 900 smaller islands in Oceania, to the east of Papua New Guinea and north-west of Vanuatu. It has a land area of , and a population of approx. 700,000. Its capita ...

. The Dororo and Guliguli languages (if they even existed) were transcriptional variants, dialects, or closely related. The speakers of Kazukuru gradually merged with the

Roviana Roviana is a member of the North West Solomonic branch of Oceanic languages. It is spoken around Roviana and Vonavona lagoons at the north central New Georgia in the Solomon Islands. It has 10,000 first-language speakers and an additional 16,000 ...

people from the sixteenth century onward and adopted Roviana as their language. Kazukuru was last recorded in the early twentieth century when its speakers were in the last stages of language shift. Today, Kazukuru is the name of a clan in the Roviana people group.

History of documentation

Most of what is known about Kazukuru was collected by W.H.L. Waterhouse and published with S.H. Ray in an article in 1931. Some additional Kazukuru data and the only information on Dororo and Guliguli (two short wordlists) were published by Peter Lanyon-Orgill in 1953. Davis (2003) is skeptical that Guliguli ever existed, since the word ''guliguli'' has an obscene meaning in the neighboring Hoava language, and there is no memory among Hoava speakers of a neighboring language with that name. Guliguli was probably either a dialect of Kazukuru, a naive transcription of name ''Kazukuru'', or even a hoax.

Classification

Arthur Capell suggested that Kazukuru was a non-Austronesian ( Papuan) language, and

Stephen Wurm Stephen Adolphe Wurm ( hu, Wurm István Adolf, ; 19 August 1922 – 24 October 2001) was a Hungarian-born Australian linguist. Early life Wurm was born in Budapest, the second child to the German-speaking Adolphe Wurm and the Hungarian-sp ...

accordingly placed all three languages in a 'Kazukuru family' within the East Papuan phylum. However, Michael Dunn and Malcolm Ross (2007) argue that the structure, phonology and lexicon of Kazukuru are strikingly similar to

Oceanic languages The approximately 450 Oceanic languages are a branch of the Austronesian languages. The area occupied by speakers of these languages includes Polynesia, as well as much of Melanesia and Micronesia. Though covering a vast area, Oceanic languages ...

and that Kazukuru almost certainly was an Oceanic language, related to other New Georgia languages such as

, Hoava and Ghanongga. The alleged Dororo and Guliguli wordlists are so similar to the recorded Kazukuru wordlist that they are almost certainly different transcriptions of the same language.

References

{{Languages of the Solomon Islands Meso-Melanesian languages Extinct languages of Oceania