Usarufa is a
Kainantu language
Kainantu is a town in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. It had some historical significance as an airstrip town during WWII. It functions primarily as a market town for local produce growers and cash croppers. It is located on the "High ...
spoken by the people of the same name in
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; , ; tpi, Papua Niugini; ho, Papua Niu Gini), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea ( tpi, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; ho, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), is a country i ...
. It belongs to the Gauwa branch of the Kainantu family of the
Kainantu–Goroka languages
The Kainantu–Goroka languages are a family of Papuan languages established by Arthur Capell in 1948 under the name East Highlands. They formed the core of Stephen Wurm's 1960 East New Guinea Highlands family (the precursor of Trans–New Gu ...
. The language area consists of six villages: Moife, Imikori, Irafo, Kagu, Agura 1, and Agura 2. Its
ISO 639
ISO 639 is a set of standards by the International Organization for Standardization that is concerned with representation of names for languages and language groups.
It was also the name of the original standard, approved in 1967 (as ''ISO 639/R ...
code is ''usa''.
As of 2009, the language was reported to have had about 1200 speakers and no fluent speakers below the age of 25, which makes it an
endangered language
An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...
.
See also
*
Vida Chenoweth
Vida Chenoweth (October 18, 1928 – December 14, 2018) was a solo classical marimbist, an ethnomusicologist, and a linguist.
Credited with being the first to perform polyphonic music on the marimba and for doing for the marimba what Pablo Casa ...
, who studied the Usarufa music
*
Aikuma
Aikuma is an Android App for collecting speech recordings with time-aligned translations. The app includes a text-free interface for consecutive interpretation, designed for users who are not literate. The Aikuma won Grand Prize in the Open Sou ...
, mobile software for language recording, first used to record Usarufa
References
External links
*
OLAC Resources in and about the Usarufa Language*
*
Paradisec
The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) is a cross-institutional project that supports work on endangered languages and cultures of the Pacific and the region around Australia. They digitise reel-to ...
has a collection of
Stephen A Wurm's materials
SAW3 that include Usarufa materials.
{{Kainantu–Goroka languages
Kainantu–Goroka languages
Endangered languages of Oceania
Languages of Eastern Highlands Province
Endangered Papuan languages