Nduke

Duke, known to its own speakers as Dughore or Kolei, is an Oceanic language of Kolombangara island in the New Georgia group of the Solomon Islands; the name Duke is an outsider's exonym.

Oral history records that the north-west, north-east and south-east of the island once had languages of their own, but those communities were annihilated in warfare in the early 1800s and their tongues died with them; only the south-western Dughore people survived, holding out in a chain of hill fortresses.

In the later nineteenth century exchange with Vella Lavella, Simbo and Roviana brought borrowed vocabulary into the language. Duke keeps the Oceanic pronoun series, including dual and trial forms, and marks inalienable possession of body parts and kin with possessive suffixes.