When we talk about the highest points on Earth, we only ever talk about Mt Everest. It is no doubt the top of the world, but its status as the tallest mountain is under debate, since Hawai’i’s Mauna Kea, when measured from its underwater base to summit, stands at 9330m, around 500 metres taller than Mt Everest’s 8848m. While Mauna Kea could be argued to be the tallest mountain of the world, most of this is underwater. Only 4205m of it is above sea level, but it is without doubt one of the tallest points one can reach on an island.

But it is not the highest point of an island in the world. That honour goes to Puncak Jaya on the island of New Guinea, the most linguistically diverse region in the world. Standing at 4884m above sea level, Puncak Jaya has an interesting geography, in addition to its prominence as the highest point of any island in the world. It is situated just south of the equator, well nestled in the tropics. Yet, at this altitude, it is cold enough for it to harbour glaciers on its slopes. One of the only, and perhaps one of the last equatorial glaciers of the world, these are under threat of glacial retreat due to global warming.

Puncak Jaya is in the Sudirman Range in the Mimika Regency of Central Papua, Indonesia. While Puncak Jaya translates to “Glorious Peak” from Bahasa Indonesia, it also goes by another name by the indigenous language spoken in the region — Nemangkawi Ninggok. This translates to “Peak of the White Arrow”, from the language called Amung-kal.

Amung-kal is spoken by the Amung people, who live in the highlands of Central Papua and consider the mountains around them sacred. This most likely also applies to Nemangkawi Ninggok, alongside other peaks in the Sudirman Range. But this is not quite the only tongue spoken in the region. Symbolic languages spoken by the Amung are also documented, such as Aro-a-kal, and Tebo-a-kal is only spoken in sacred areas, such as mountains. Whether or not these could be considered separate languages or more plausibly, a language register, remains to be studied.

Amung-kal is just one variety of the Uhunduni languages, with it also being referred to as Amung and Damal by the Amung and Damal peoples respectively. While spoken by around 14 000 people, this data was last recorded in the year 2000, so the languages’ statuses could have changed in the 23 years since. The Endangered Languages Project puts this estimate closer to 4000-5000 speakers, as of 2007.

The classification of the Uhunduni languages is uncertain. Traditional classification considered the Uhunduni languages as part of the Trans-New Guinea languages under the West Papuan Highlands branch. Among which, Uhunduni is most closely related to the Dem language, a language so obscure that speaker numbers were last recorded, or more rather, estimated, in 1987. Both Amung and Dem are considered to be threatened by the Endangered Languages Project, a worrying trend as the Sudirman Range is being exploited by mining industries, exposing these people groups to potential conflict with the mining corporations that operate there.

More recently, some linguists consider the Uhunduni languages as separate from the Trans-New Guinea language family, or even as a language isolate. This shows the difficulty of classifying the languages of New Guinea, and this alone could be an understatement.

It also appears that finding further information of this language is difficult as well. Most of the resources are listed on Glottolog, but I was unable to access to a great deal of them. Others are in Bahasa Indonesia as well, posing a language barrier to those who are interested in this language. Voorhoeve (1975) has provided a wordlist of some basic words to the Trans-New Guinea database, from which we could see some of the sounds of Uhunduni.

Interestingly, the word for ‘bone’ shares the same word as ‘leg’, as dok or nok. It also appears that consonant clusters do not really appear in Uhunduni, at least that was what I could interpret from the glosses provided in the wordlist. Perhaps another point to make is that while Uhunduni makes distinctions between singular and plural pronouns, the dual first person pronoun exists, according to an analysis by Ross (2005). Although it is unclear from the information given if the Uhunduni languages makes distinctions between the inclusive and exclusive ‘we’, it was noted that the dual first person pronoun was an inclusive ‘we’.

And this is just about as far as I could get in exploring the Uhunduni languages. With the scarcity of accessible resources around the language, it is definitely difficult to put together interesting aspects of the languages spoken on the highest point of any island in the world. But this underscores a pattern found in many languages of New Guinea. With many difficult to classify, lacking data, or basically undocumented, despite the diversity of languages on the island of New Guinea, there is simply not much really done to document them in more detail than some pronouns and a wordlist of basic vocabulary. Perhaps I would attempt to cover this some time in the future, when more papers, articles, publications become more available, and when more studies are conducted concerning Uhunduni.