Yangoru Boiken - Orientation

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."

Location. The Yangoru Boiken live between 3° 36′ and 3°45′ S and 143°14′ and 143°22′ E, around Yangoru government station in the southern foothills of the Prince Alexander range. Annual rainfall is about 175 centimeters.

Demography. In 1980, the Boiken numbered some 40,000 people. Of these, about 13,300 were Yangoru Boiken, though only about 9,600 were resident in Yangoru; the rest were living elsewhere in Papua New Guinea. This total represents a considerable increase over the 4,000 to 5,000 Yangoru Boiken estimated at the beginning of significant European contact in the 1920s. In 1980, overall density in Yangoru averaged about 51 persons per square kilometer; within the main population belt, however, it averaged 66 persons per square kilometer. The population growth rate is about 2.5 to 3 percent.

Linguistic Affiliation. The Yangoru Boiken have been classified as one of seven dialect groups of the Boiken language, Ndu Family, Middle Sepik Stock, of the Sepik-Ramu Phylum. The Boiken language is perhaps more accurately characterized, however, as two or more linguistically chained languages, with the Yangoru Boiken located toward the middle of the chain.