Sulka

Sulka is a language isolate of New Britain, Papua New Guinea. In 1991, there were 2,500 speakers in eastern Pomio District, East New Britain Province. Villages include Guma () in East Pomio Rural LLG. With such a low population of speakers, this language is considered to be endangered. Sulka speakers had originally migrated to East New Britain from New Ireland. Sulka may be described as having ancient Papuan (non-Austronesian) roots, which additionally displays morphosyntactic constructions and some vocabulary items associated with the Oceanic branch of Austronesian (i.e. languages of the St. George linkage such as Mali). Alternatively, it has been proposed as possibly related to Kol or Baining as part of the East Papuan proposal, but Palmer (2018) treats Sulka as a language isolate. Sulka has some influence from the Mengen language. Over 3,000 to 3,500 years ago, the linguistic ancestors of Sulka speakers arrived in the Papua New Guinea area. Although the history of the language is not well known, it may display a mixture of Oceanic and Papuan language traits. These are languages Sulka came into contact with, when the peoples speaking these other languages populated the area in neighboring villages, around 3,200 years ago. Sulka is spoken along the coastal region of Wide Bay, on the Southern coast of the Gazelle Peninsula, on the eastern side of New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea. Some estimate speakers to number as high as between 3,000 and 3,500. Reesink (2005) reports on some Sulka speakers who have intermingled in neighboring villages with speakers of other languages such as Mali, southeast of Kokopo. The phonological system of Sulka comprises 28 contrasting segments, fourteen consonants, and seven vowels. On the topic of consonants, there is no recent evidence to support contrast between [b] and [β], therefore they're assumed to be allophones and are represented in the table of consonants as [β] only. Sulka consonants are: For its vowels, Sulka has a contrast between three front vowels: high, mid, and low, [i], [e], and [ε], but there is no instance of the central high vowel [ɨ].