Learning Uriay

We’ve been in Wabuku for a total of 2 months now. Our lives have changed in so many ways since moving in here. Most of them have been good, including finally having a place to call our home. A few have been difficult. But overall, we are loving it in here!

Our main focus since moving in has been culture and language study. We spend a lot of time out with the people in the village, learning how they live and interact. Our hope is that all the information we are gathering will one day allow us to effectively communicate God’s truth in a way that they can understand.

For language study, we can use the trade language that we learned when we first arrived in PNG as a bridge to help us gather nouns and common, useful phrases in Uriay. We are mostly learning words right now, and later we will move to constructing sentences.

Uriay has a lot of words, but most of them are fairly easy to obtain. They are based in what you can see around you. Many things that we have in English don’t have names in Uriay because the people never use them, such as computer, stove, sink, bath tub, etc. They could come up with a rough translation, like “place for washing plates” or “place for cooking food”, but it makes it a bit simpler for us to learn their language because they don’t have as many nouns as we do.

The one thing that is a bit tricky with Uriay is that many words sound and look alike, which can potentially be embarrassing depending on your situation. For instance, “una” and “uma” are very similar, but the first one means “sago palm” (which is a tree that provides a staple food in their diet) and the second means “poop”. Don’t want to get those confused.

Overall, most of the words in Uriay look and sound nothing like English. It’s going to take a lot of time and hard work to learn this language. Our brains often feel like mush at the end of a day of studying. But we know all the work will be worth it!