| Usku | |
|---|---|
| Afra | |
| Region | Usku village, Senggi District, Keerom Regency, Papua, Indonesia |
Native speakers | 20 to 160 (2007)[1] |
Pauwasi
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | ulf |
| Glottolog | usku1243 |
| ELP | Afra |
 Usku is classified as Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger | |
Usku, or Afra, is a nearly extinct and poorly documented Papuan language spoken by 20 or more people, mostly adults, in Usku village, Senggi District, Keerom Regency, Papua, Indonesia.
Wurm (1975) placed it as an independent branch of Trans–New Guinea, but Ross (2005) could not find enough evidence to classify it. Usher (2020) found that it was one of the West Pauwasi languages, though divergent from the other two branches of that family.[2] Foley (2018) classifies Usku as a language isolate.[3]
An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)[4] found lexical similarities between Usku and Kaure. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.
- ^ Usku at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- ^ New Guinea World
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
Foley-NWNGwas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013).