Duriankari, or Duriankere, is a possibly extinct Papuan language (or dialect) of Indonesian Papua. It is associated with the village of Duriankari at the southern tip of the island of Salawati, which is part of the Raja Ampat Archipelago and is adjacent to the Bird's Head Peninsula of the West Papuan mainland.

Duriankari
Native to	Indonesia
Region	Salawati, Sorong Regency, West Papua
Extinct	1990s?
Language family	? South Bird's Head Inanwatan–Duriankere Duriankari
Language codes
ISO 639-3	dbn
Glottolog	duri1243
ELP	Duriankere
Duriankari
Coordinates: 1.36°S 130.94°E / -1.36; 130.94

It was observed in the 1950s that its speakers were shifting to the Moi language.[1] Duriankari was reported in the 1980s to have had about 100 speakers,[2] but by the 1990s it was said to be extinct.[3] It was listed as a separate language by Voorhoeve (1975a, p. 440), but Berry & Berry (1987, p. 92) conclude that not enough is known about it to determine whether it is a separate language or a dialect of Inanwatan. The Inanwatan language is spoken in the village of Seget on the mainland across the Sele Strait, as well as in several villages in the coastal area of Inanwatan, over 150 kilometres to the east. The Inanwatan people there regard the Duriankari as descendants of Inanwatans who were carried away so far west by a mythical flood.[4]

A list of words in the language collected by J.C. Anceaux is available in Voorhoeve (1975b, p. 104) and Smits & Voorhoeve (1998).

References

Bibliography

• Berry, Keith; Berry, Christine (1987). "A survey of the South Bird's Head Stock". Workpapers in Indonesian Languages and Cultures. 4: 81–117.
• Remijsen, Albert Clementina Ludovicus (2001). Word-prosodic systems of Raja Ampat languages (PDF). Utrecht: LOT. ISBN 978-90-76864-09-9.
• Smits, Leo; Voorhoeve, C. L. (1998). The J. C. Anceaux collection of wordlists of Irian Jaya languages B: Non-Austronesian (Papuan) languages (Part II). Irian Jaya Source Material No. 10 Series B. Vol. 4. Leiden-Jakarta: DSALCUL/IRIS.
• Voorhoeve, Clemens L. (1975a). "Central and western Trans-New Guinea phylum languages". In S. A. Wurm (ed.). New Guinea area languages and language study. Vol. 1 : Papuan Languages and the New Guinea linguistic scene. Pacific linguistics, Series C, No. 38. pp. 345–459.
• Voorhoeve, Clemens L. (1975b). Languages of Irian Jaya : checklist : preliminary classification, language maps, wordlists. Pacific linguistics. Canberra: Dept. of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. ISBN 978-0-85883-128-5.
• Vries, L. J. de (2004). A short grammar of Inanwatan. An endangered language of the Bird's Head of Papua, Indonesia. Australian National University Press. ISBN 978-0-85883-545-0.