b'3. The Kiriwina people and their language_____________________________________________________________________ The Kiriwina language is spoken on the northern fringe of the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea by the indigenous inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands and the Lusancay Islands to the west, and the Marshall Bennet Islands to the east of the Trobriands.The language community numbers about 50,000.In times past they described themselves as mina Boyowa, the Boyowa people, but today they call themselves the Kiriwina people or Trobrianders. The Kiriwina language belongs to the large Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family. It is part of the Papuan Tip subgroup of Oceanic, which includes Kiriwina, Muyuw, Budibudi, and possibly also the language of the Amphlett Islands (Ross 1988).Map 1:Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea The Kiriwina people live in villages which range from about a hundred to more than a thousand inhabitants. The smaller villages frequently consist of an outer circle of dwellings and an inner circle of yam-houses. The larger villages are grouped into three or four suburbs bearing different place names, which are sometimes arranged as part of a circle, but the circular arrangement is not followed by the whole village, as traditional ownership of building sites within a village seems to ignore this circular theme. The area in the centre of a village is called the bikubaku, a communally shared area for village activities where mortuary distribution, harvest displays of heaps of yams and traditional dancing are carried out. The only houses that may be painted with traditional designs in black and red are those that belong to chiefly families. If the village is ruled 9'