Orientation – Mountain Arapesh

Identification.

The name “Mountain Arapesh” is used today to designate
speakers of the three eastern dialects of the Arapesh language in the
East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. The people described here,
however, are the group Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune intended by the
name, the people who occupied the southern two-thirds of the northeast
dialect region. Although the Mountain Arapesh are called
“Pukia” and “Bukiyip” by their neighbors,
they have no name for themselves: “Arapesh” is simply
their word for “friends” or “humans.”

Location.

Mountain Arapesh territory is located in the central mountains of the
coastal Prince Alexander and Torricelli ranges, between
3°27′ and 3°34′ S and 143°09′
and 143° 19′ E. Annual rainfall exceeds 250 centimeters
over most of the area.

Demography.

In 1932, there were at least thirteen and possibly more than twenty
Mountain Arapesh “localities” with 200-300 people each,
giving a total population between about 2,600 and 6,000 and a population
density somewhere in the range of 9-20 persons per square kilometer.

Linguistic Affiliation.

Mountain Arapesh is the northern-most of the Bukiyip dialects, which
are linguistically chained with the Muhiang dialects to the west. This
dialect chain is part of the Arapesh Language Family, commonly assigned
to the Kombio Stock of the Torricelli Phylum.