Purari language

Purari
Native to	Papua New Guinea
Region	Purari River, Gulf Province
Native speakers	7,000 (2011)[1]
Language family	unclassified (Trans–New Guinea?)
Writing system	Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3	iar
Glottolog	pura1257[2]

Purari is a Papuan language of Papua New Guinea.

Pronouns are 1sg nai, 2sg ni, 1pl enei. The first may reflect Trans–New Guinea *na, but otherwise there is little evidence to classify the language.

Name

Purari is also known as Koriki, Evorra, I'ai, Maipua, and Namau. "Namau" is a colonial term which means "deaf (lit.), inattentive, or stupid (Williams 1924: 4)." Today people of the Purari Delta find this term offensive. F.E. Williams reports that the "[a]n interpreter suggests that by some misunderstanding the name had its origin in the despair of an early missionary, who, finding the natives turned a deaf ear to his teaching, dubbed them all 'Namau'." (Williams 1924: 4). Koriki, I'ai, and Maipua refer to self-defining groups that make up the six groups that today compose the people who speak Purari. Along with the Baroi (formerly known as the Evorra, which was the name of a village site), Kaimari and the Vaimuru, these groups speak mutually intelligible dialects of Purari.

References

1. Purari at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Purari". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

• Holmes, J. H. (Jan–June 1913). "A Preliminary Study of the Namau Language, Purari Delta, Papua". Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland) 43: 124–142. doi:10.2307/2843165. JSTOR 2843165. Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Williams, F.E. (1924). The natives of the Purari Delta. Port Moresby: Government Printer.

External links