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.
Basic vocabulary
Basic vocabulary of Usku from Im (2006), quoted by Foley (2018):[5][3]
Usku basic vocabulary
gloss
Usku
‘bird’
rkwe
‘blood’
misie
‘bone’
kra
‘breast’
mi
‘ear’
bekria
‘eat’
nggreka
‘egg’
kri
‘eye’
nifi
‘fire’
yo
‘give’
roti
‘go’
rifri
‘ground’
taʔ
‘hair’
klekondia
‘hear’
yukri
‘I’
o
‘leg’
nafu
‘louse’
nimi
‘man’
na
‘moon’
menggrine
‘name’
təkwar
‘one’
kuskafi
‘road, path’
tra
‘see’
fra
‘sky’
mumgre
‘stone’
pani
‘sun’
winene
‘tongue’
bra
‘tooth’
ninggre
‘tree’
ninani
‘two’
narse
‘water’
a/æ
‘we’
no
‘woman’
ria
‘you (sg)’
po
‘you (pl)’
so
The following basic vocabulary words are from the Trans-New Guinea database:[6]
^ abcdeFoley, William A. (2018). "The languages of Northwest New Guinea". In Palmer, Bill (ed.). The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide. The World of Linguistics. Vol. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 433–568. ISBN978-3-11-028642-7.
^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).
^Im, Youn-Shim. 2006. Survey Report on the Usku Language of Papua, Indonesia. Unpublished report. Jayapura: SIL Indonesia.
