Yangoru-Boiken
Yangoru-Boiken
Papua New Guinea
Identification.
The Boiken people of the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, occupy one of the most extensive and ecologically heterogeneous territories in New Guinea. Their boundaries encompass the islands of Walis, Tarawai, and Muschu in the Bismarck Sea and cut a broad swathe inland across the coastal Prince Alexander range before descending through fertile foothills into the rolling grassland north of the Sepik River. Coupled with their complex migrational prehistory, this ecological heterogeneity has conferred an extreme linguistic and cultural diversity on the Boiken, and consequently only one dialect group, the Yangoru Boiken, is described here. The Yangoru Boiken speak five distinct subdialects, each of which exhibits distinct subcultural variations; the data to follow are most representative of the north central subdialect speakers in the villagers of Sima, Kambelyi, and Kworabri. "Boiken" is the name of the coastal village where the first missionaries lived; "Yangoru" is the local name of the area in which Yangoru Patrol Post was located. Until European contact, the Yangoru Boiken had no conception of themselves as a single unit; local polities referred to themselves only as nina, which means "we all," or tua, which means "people."
Person TypeCulture
American, 1914–1997
French, established 14th century
