Taupota is an

Oceanic language The approximately 450 Oceanic languages are a branch of the Austronesian languages. The area occupied by speakers of these languages includes Polynesia, as well as much of Melanesia and Micronesia. Though covering a vast area, Oceanic languages ...

of the

Milne Bay Province Milne Bay is a province of Papua New Guinea. Its capital is Alotau. The province covers 14,345 km2 of land and 252,990 km2 of sea, within the province there are more than 600 islands, about 160 of which are inhabited. The province has ...

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...

. It appears to be a

dialect chain A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated variet ...

, with southern varieties called Wa'ema and western Wedau. The Wedau variety, which varies between villages, was adopted by Anglican missionaries who settled in Dogura and so became the ''

lingua franca A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, link language or language of wider communication (LWC), is a Natural language, language systematically used to make co ...

'' for the southern coast of Goodenough Bay.

References

Further information

* Nuclear Papuan Tip languages Languages of Milne Bay Province {{PapuanTip-lang-stub