Across the Great Divide: How Birth-Order Terms Scaled the Saruwaged Mountains in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

The Papuan language Nungon is spoken in four villages of the Uruwa River valley, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea, each with its own dialect. Only the Kotet village dialect has a system of birth-order terms, which form a nominal subclass. The Kotet birth-order terms are formally similar to birth-order terms in Papuan languages to the south. Because Kotet was historically oriented southward for trade, the Kotet birth-order terms are postulated to have been borrowed from the south. Every language in the area with birth-order terms, including the Kotet dialect, exhibits differences in the forms of the terms, term recycling within the system, and ordering of the terms. Thus, the specific trajectory by which the birth-order terms reached Kotet village is murky.