Duriankari

Timothy Usher, Santa Fe Institute

Duriankari, or Duriankere, is spoken by less than 100 people (1987) living in a single village, Duriankari, on Salawati (Duriankari) island at the south end of the Sele strait at the western tip of the Bird's Head peninsula, far to the west of its nearest relative Inanwatan, in Indonesia's West Papua province (Voorhoeve 1975: 34, 1975: 440, Berry and Berry 1987: 92, de Vries 2004: 1-2.) De Vries (pp. 96-102) relates an Inanwatan story in which the Duriankari descend from an Inanwatan group which was carried to the island by a flood. According to de Vries, Duriankari may have been extinct as of 1994.

[under construction]

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While there is no published phonology of Duriankari, inspection of the materials in combination with comparison to Inanwatan suggests perhaps 12 consonants and 5 vowels as follows

The most conspicuous differences between Duriankari and Inanwatan phonology are, first, Duriankari preserves /*k/ as /k/ rather than as glottal stop /ʔ/ as in Inanwatan, and that Duriankari does not undergo Inanwatan's lenition of medial nasals /*m *n/ to non-stops [w ɾ], nor is initial /*ɾ/ merged with /n/.

Voorhoeve (1975: 440) gives free pronouns for Duriankere as follows:

While several forms here correspond to those of other South Bird's Head languages, others are mysterious and may be unreliable.

Like Inanwatan and other South Bird's Head languages, Duriankere prefixes inalienable possessors to nominals; however there is not enough data to arrive at a complete set.

Nothing is known about Duriankere verbal morphology.