Bukawa

Bukawa is an Oceanic language of the Austronesian family, spoken in coastal villages along the Huon Gulf in north-eastern Papua New Guinea, from Cape Arkona to the outskirts of Lae. It belongs to the North Huon Gulf group with Yabem and Kela; like Yabem it has developed phonemic tone. Its name comes from Yabem, drawn from the village of Bugawac on Cape Arkona, and the language splits into four regional dialects.

Traditional Bukawa counting runs over the fingers of both hands and then the feet, so that twenty is expressed as one person, and families use birth-order names in which the seventh son is called No Name.

The gulf was unknown to Europeans until the 1790s, when the French expedition of d'Entrecasteaux, searching for the lost explorer Lapérouse, charted these coasts and named the gulf after its officer Huon de Kermadec.