Usku, or Afra, is a nearly
extinct and poorly documented
Papuan language
The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non-Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geogra ...
spoken by 20 or more people, mostly adults, in
Usku village,
Senggi District,
Keerom Regency
Keerom Regency is one of the regencies (''kabupaten'') in the Papua Province of Indonesia. It was formed from the eastern districts then within Jayapura Regency with effect from 12 November 2002. It covers an area of 9,365 km2, and had a po ...
,
Papua,
Indonesia
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...
.
Wurm (1975) placed it as an independent branch of
Trans–New Guinea, but
Ross (2005) could not find enough evidence to classify it. Usher (2020) found that it was one of the
West Pauwasi languages, though divergent from the other two branches of that family. Foley (2018) classifies Usku as a
language isolate.
An automated computational analysis (
ASJP 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 marker ''se''
*tense suffix ''-mu ~ -mo''
*
allative
In grammar, the allative case (; abbreviated ; from Latin ''allāt-'', ''afferre'' "to bring to") is a type of locative grammatical case. The term allative is generally used for the lative case in the majority of languages that do not make finer ...
postposition
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
''se''
*
ablative
In grammar, the ablative case (pronounced ; sometimes abbreviated ) is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in the grammars of various languages; it is sometimes used to express motion away from something, among other uses. ...
''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