Kuot

The Kuot are the only Papuan-speaking people of New Ireland, a long, narrow island in the Bismarck Archipelago: their language, also called Panaras, is an isolate with no proven relatives, spoken in about ten villages of the northern districts, where earlier populations held out as Austronesian languages spread around them. Even so, Kuot left its mark on those neighbours, and several New Ireland languages are thought to have adopted sound changes through contact with it.

The Dutch sailors Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten made the first recorded European landing on the island in 1616, and from 1799 onwards whaling ships called regularly for water and provisions, sometimes taking islanders on as crew.