Burum of Papua New Guinea

Adjusting to Dialect Differences

The leaders of the Burums asked SIL linguist Soini Oikkonen how to write the phoneme kw, made in the back and the front of the mouth simultaneously:

a. like English "qu"?
b. like Pidgin "kw"?
c. like Kate "q"?

(Many Burums were taught to read Kate, a neighboring language, without understanding it.)

First they chose "kw" like Pidgin.

But on testing, Soini found that the Burums of Yakne say "kp" instead of "kw." They pronounce kwet, meaning "name," as kpet. When they saw kwet written, they thought it was kawet, meaning "sea."

So the committee decided on "q" like Kate. This suits all dialects because it does not specify which "lip-sound" (w or p) goes with the k sound.