Duke (Nduke, pronounced N-doo-kay) is anOceanic language now spoken by about 3,000 people onKolombangara island,Solomon Islands. Duke is an exonymic name (not used by speakers themselves). Endonymic names (used by the speakers themselves) areDughore (Ndughore) andKolei.Dughore is also a name for an area in southwest Kolombangara,Kolei is the general bilateral address term specific to Nduke. A more recent alternative name is 'Kolombangara' (after the name of the island).

Oral history in Dughore recounts that the northwest, northeast and southeast of Kolombangara had their own languages, which became extinct when the people of those areas were annihilated in warfare that probably occurred in the early 19th century. The people of the southwest built a series of hill fortresses and survived. At the beginning of the colonial period (about 1900), Duke had about 250 speakers, all concentrated in the southwest.^[2]

Inter-island exchange with neighbouring island language areas ofVella Lavella,Simbo andRoviana was strong in the latter 19th century, possibly leading to some language borrowing, although marriage remained largelyendogamous at that time. In the early twentieth century, colonial rule instituted Roviana as alingua franca, and the Seventh-day Adventist church, which was widely adopted on Kolombangara, used Bible materials written inMarovo. By the mid-twentieth century marriages to Marovo became numerous and many households are bilingual Duke–Marovo. Roviana, although it ceased to be a regional lingua franca in the 1960s, is still widely understood by Duke speakers. Twentieth-century borrowing from Roviana and Marovo has occurred to a small extent.

From the 1960s onward many marriages have taken place across the wider Solomons, leading to mixed-language communities, at the same time thatSolomon Pijin has risen to prominence as a national language. As a result, Pijin is a widely used household language on Kolombangara, which in some families has almost fully replaced Duke. Additionally, re-orientation of the economy away from the traditional Oceanic lifestyle has led to less reliance ontraditional ecological knowledge and traditional technology, so that many specialist terms have largely been forgotten. The lexical richness of the language is now markedly less among speakers under 40 years old.Ethnologue rates the language as 'vigorous'.^[3]

Orthography refers to the spelling system used to write words down. The Nduke alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet. The first systematic orthography was used byA. M. Hocart in 1908 to document a Nduke wordlist and Nduke anthropological fieldnotes. These sources were never published and did not form the basis for later orthographies. Two variant orthographies arose in local use, based on that used by the Methodist mission for Roviana, and that used by the Seventh-day Adventist mission for Marovo. These missions arrived in Nduke in 1917 and 1919 respectively. Recent lexical work on Nduke has used a composite of these two orthographies to avoid ambiguity.^[4]

There are five diphthongs:/ei/,/ai/,/ae/,/au/, and/oi/

The pronoun series is typically Oceanic. In addition to the basic forms tabulated below, dual and trial forms exist.

Possession may be grammatically marked in two ways. Preposed possessive particles can be used. 'Inalienable' possession, as in the case of body parts, kin, or inherent characteristics, can be marked by possessive suffixes.

Modern Nduke is tending away from use of these possessive series in preference for the general possessive markerta, as inmata ta rai ('my eye').

Deictic terms are 'pointing words'. In addition to the personal deixis (pronoun and possessive) series above, Nduke has classes of words for spatial and time deixis.

Sources for documentation of Nduke language have been noted by Palmer 2005.^[5] Grammar notes above have been sourced from Scales 1997.^[6] Wordlists include Hocart 1908,^[7] Tryon and Hackman 1983,^[8] and an online wordlist based on Tryon and Hackman.^[9] Lexical and Bible translation work are currently underway.

• Northwest Solomonic languages
• Languages of the Solomon Islands

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