Taboo and secrecy in Nungon speech

Nungon is an umbrella term for the four southern, higher-elevation village-lects of a dialect continuum in the Uruwa River valley, Saruwaged Mountains, Papua New Guinea (Sarvasy 2013, 2014, 2015a,b, 2016, 2017a,b,c, 2018; Sarvasy and Ögate, forthcoming). In this oval-shaped continuum with the Uruwa River running through the center, each village community traditionally had its own dialect. The history of use of the term Nungon is unknown, but no language surveys by nonPapua New Guinean researchers through the 1960s (Hooley and McElhanon 1970: 1084-1085) include the term; in these, the village names serve as language names. It is likely that use of nungon ‘what’ as an exemplar of language and thence as an official language name is related to Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) work in the northern portion of the dialect continuum in 1987-1995; SIL used the form yaö ‘what’ in northern dialects to label the entire continuum. This is the source of the language name Yau used by Ethnologue (); more accurately, the continuum could be referred to with the name Uruwa. The grammar of Nungon (Sarvasy 2017a) focuses on the Towet village variety, with comparative notes on the Kotet, Worin and Yawan Nungon dialects, and on the more distant Sagain and Mup “Nuon” dialects (in which there is rampant consonant elision, hence nuon for‘what’).