The
Republic of Nauru
Nauru ( or ; na, Naoero), officially the Republic of Nauru ( na, Repubrikin Naoero) and formerly known as Pleasant Island, is an island country and microstate in Oceania, in the Central Pacific. Its nearest neighbour is Banaba Island in Ki ...
originally consisted of 169 villages; by 1900 these were already partly abandoned, uninhabited or destroyed. With the increasing population growth the single villages merged into a single connected settlement, which today is spread out around the entire coastal strip.
The village names are from the book
Nauru - Ergebnisse der Südseeexpedition by
Paul Hambruch
Paul Hambruch (22 November 1882, Hamburg – 25 June 1933, Hamburg) was a German ethnologist and folklorist.
Biography
He studied natural sciences, chemistry and mathematics at the University of Göttingen and geography, anthropology and eth ...
, who researched on the island during the
Hamburger Südsee-Expedition 1908–1910. The village names were changed following the orthographic reform of the
Nauruan language
The Nauruan or Nauru language () is an Austronesian language, spoken natively in the island country of Nauru. Its relationship to the other Micronesian languages is not well understood.
Phonology
Consonants
Nauruan has 16–17 consonant ph ...
of
1939.
List
See also
*
Geography of Nauru
Nauru is a tiny phosphate rock island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean south of the Marshall Islands in Oceania. It is only south of the Equator at coordinates . Nauru is one of the three great phosphate rock islands in the Pacific O ...
{{Nauru topics
Nauru
Cities
A city is a human settlement of notable size.Goodall, B. (1987) ''The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography''. London: Penguin.Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) ''The Social Science Encyclopedia''. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. It can be def ...