Bwaidoga

Bwaidoga, recorded in some sources as Bwaidoka, is an Oceanic language of the Papuan Tip cluster, spoken on Goodenough Island, also called Nidula, the westernmost of the D'Entrecasteaux Islands off the eastern tip of New Guinea.

It heads a small linkage of closely related speech forms on the island, among them Diodio, Iduna and Iamalele, and serves as a local lingua franca beyond its home villages.

The island's people, related to the Papuans of the mainland, have inhabited its steep volcanic slopes for several thousand years, farming the narrow coastal plains while the mountainous interior remained almost untouched. Europeans first sighted the archipelago in 1792, when the French navigator Bruni d'Entrecasteaux sailed through the Solomon Sea in search of the lost expedition of La Perouse.