Kuot, also called Panaras, is a language isolate and the only non-Austronesian language spoken on the island of New Ireland in Papua New Guinea, with about 1,500 fluent speakers estimated in 2002 across ten villages on the island's eastern and western coasts, the primary documented variety coming from Bimun village. It has no known linguistic relatives and no significant internal dialect variation, and it is typologically unusual among Papuan languages for its verb-subject-object word order. UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger classifies Kuot as vulnerable, since most children now grow up speaking Tok Pisin instead.
Facts
RegionNew Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea 1 Speaker Count Proto-Language StatusAn endangered language isolate; most if not all children now grow up speaking Tok Pisin instead 1 Sources
1. Wikipedia: Kuot Language
Wikimedia FoundationLead paragraph, sentence 1
The Kuot language, or Panaras, is a language isolate, the only non-Austronesian language spoken on the island of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea.
Lead paragraph, sentence 2
Lindström (2002: 30) estimates that there are 1,500 fluent speakers of Kuot.
Status section, sentence 1
Kuot is an endangered language and most children, if not all, grow up speaking Tok Pisin instead.
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