Soq is spoken near Astrolabe Bay, in the villages Male, Kaliku, and Buram. There are probably 700 people or so who speak it, but it’s hard to be sure. It was one of the earliest Papuan languages to be documented--the Russian explorer Nikolai Nikolaevich Mikloucho-Maclay lived in the nearby Bongu-speaking village of Gorendu for over a year starting in 1871. But Maclay didn’t record a lot about Soq, only a few words, and we didn’t know all that much more when I first visited Kaliku with my wife in 2016.
Soq belongs to the Rai Coast branch of the Madang family. Its phonology is interesting because it has some words that have long clusters of consonants—in fact, sometimes a word has no vowels and is just one long consonant cluster! An example is qjrq, pronounced [qʤɾʁ], which means ‘to lock’. Soq also has an interesting tense system, which I wrote about with Grev Corbett in a 2019 paper.
Below are some pictures of our fieldwork in Kaliku.
Soq belongs to the Rai Coast branch of the Madang family. Its phonology is interesting because it has some words that have long clusters of consonants—in fact, sometimes a word has no vowels and is just one long consonant cluster! An example is qjrq, pronounced [qʤɾʁ], which means ‘to lock’. Soq also has an interesting tense system, which I wrote about with Grev Corbett in a 2019 paper.
Below are some pictures of our fieldwork in Kaliku.
In the video below, you can see Lynn Yanam and Julita Yum speaking Soq. They’re watching a movie called the Pear Film, which Lynn watched on her own earlier and described to Julita.