Bukawa Language

Bukawa (also known as Bukaua, Kawac, Bugawac, Gawac) is an Austronesian language spoken by about 10,000 people (in 1978) on the coast of the Huon Gulf, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. The most common spelling of the name in both community and government usage is Bukawa (Eckermann 2007:1), even though it comes from the Yabem language, which served as a church and school lingua franca in the coastal areas around the Gulf for most of the 20th century. This ethnonym, which now designates Bukawa-speakers in general, derives from the name of a prominent village on the Bugawac ('River Gawac') at Cape Arkona in the center of the north coast.

Ethnologue notes that 40% of Bukawa speakers are monolingual (or perhaps were in 1978). This claim is hard to credit unless one discounts both Tok Pisin, the national language of Papua New Guinea, and Yabem, the local Lutheran mission lingua franca. The anthropologist Ian Hogbin, who did fieldwork in the large Bukawa-speaking village of Busama on the south coast shortly after World War II, found that everyone was multilingual in three languages: Tok Pisin, Yabem, and their village language (Hogbin 1951).