Usku, or Afra, is a nearly

extinct Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...

and poorly documented Papuan language spoken by 20 or more people, mostly adults, in Usku village,

Senggi District Senggi District is a district in Keerom Regency, Papua, Indonesia. Villages As of 2018, Senggi consists of 7 administrative villages (''kampung'').Badan Pusat Statistik Kabupaten KeeromKecamatan Senggi Dalam Angka 2018 The indigenous Papuan la ...

, Keerom Regency, Papua, Indonesia. Wurm (1975) placed it as an independent branch of Trans–New Guinea, but

Ross Ross or ROSS may refer to: People * Clan Ross, a Highland Scottish clan * Ross (name), including a list of people with the surname or given name Ross, as well as the meaning * Earl of Ross, a peerage of Scotland Places * RoSS, the Republic of Sou ...

(2005) could not find enough evidence to classify it. Usher (2020) found that it was one of the

West Pauwasi languages The West Pauwasi languages are a likely family of Papuan languages spoken on the Indonesian side of New Guinea. They may either form part of a larger Pauwasi language family along with the Eastern Pauwasi languages The East Pauwasi languages ...

, though divergent from the other two branches of that family. Foley (2018) classifies Usku as a

language isolate Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The num ...

. An automated computational analysis (

ASJP The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to comparative linguistics using a database of word lists. The database is open access and consists of 40-item basic-vocabulary lists ...

4) by Müller et al. (2013)Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013.
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'. found lexical similarities between Usku and Kaure. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.

Basic vocabulary

Basic vocabulary of Usku from Im (2006), quoted by Foley (2018): : The following basic vocabulary words are from the Trans-New Guinea database: :

Morphology

Usku morphology as inferred by Foley (2018): *

dative In grammar, the dative case (abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a ...

marker ''se'' *tense suffix ''-mu ~ -mo'' * allative postposition ''se'' * ablative ''e''

Sentences

Word order in Usku is SOV. Some of the few documented sentences in Usku are:

References

External links

Usku word list at TransNewGuinea.orgOLAC resources in and about the Usku language
{{Papuan languages Critically endangered languages Endangered languages of Oceania Languages of western New Guinea West Pauwasi languages