unuopa

Unuopa is a small endangered language of the Austronesian family, traditionally spoken by the Unuopa people in the northeastern part of the island of Paku in the South Pacific. It is classified within the Central–Eastern sub‑branch, and shares close lexical and phonological affinities with neighboring languages such as Voko and Tok. The language has approximately 5,000 speakers, most of whom are over the age of 45, with a rapidly declining number of fluent speakers among younger generations.

The phonemic inventory of Unuopa includes a six‑vowel system (/i e a o u a/), each vowel contrastive in length, and a consonant series that incorporates both stops and nasals with a single lateral. Tone is generally not lexical, but pitch differences are employed for pragmatic emphasis. Morphologically, Unuopa is agglutinative, using suffixes to indicate tense, aspect, and mood. Its basic word order is subject‑verb‑object, though topicality can trigger flexible syntactic structures. Notably, the language preserves a complex system of evidentiality, marking the source of information (direct, reported, inferred) through inflection on the main verb.

Recent anthropological work has focused on documenting oral histories, myths, and traditional ecological knowledge embedded in Unuopa. A community‑driven revitalization program began in 2018, involving the creation of bilingual educational materials and training of younger speakers as language teachers. Collaborative projects with universities in Honolulu and Wellington have produced a comprehensive grammar sketch, a dictionary of approximately 3,000 headwords, and several recorded corpora archived in the Pacific Language Archive. Continued support from UNESCO and local government agencies aims to ensure the survival of Unuopa as a living language and cultural heritage.