Pondo

Pondo is another name for Angoram, called Kanda by its speakers, a Papuan language of the lower Sepik River in northern Papua New Guinea. It belongs to the small Lower Sepik family, once known as Nor–Pondo, whose other branches include Murik and Kopar at the river mouth and the inland Chambri and Karawari–Yimas tongues.

The Pondo languages and Kopar share distinctive first- and second-person pronouns built around the sound p, which set them apart from Murik; some classifiers place the family with the Ramu languages, though this remains disputed.

Pondo villagers live in the Sepik's vast swamp basin, where the river runs straight into the Bismarck Sea without a delta. The Spaniard Yñigo Ortiz de Retez sailed the northern coast and in 1545 named the island New Guinea, though the Sepik waterways stayed hidden from outsiders for centuries afterward.