Nukuoro Documentation Project
The Nukuoro Documentation Project was founded in 2015 as an ongoing collaboration between Nukuoro community leaders and linguists at the University of California, Berkeley and Swarthmore College to document, revitalize, and celebrate Nukuoro language and culture.
This website contains texts, audio, video, and photos that have been recorded during two documentation projects: one carried out by Vern Carroll, Raymonde Carroll, and Tobias Soulik on Nukuoro Atoll between 1963-1966, and one documentation project led by Johnny Rudolph and Emily Drummond in Kolonia, Pohnpei and on Nukuoro Atoll from 2015-present. This is a companion resource to the Nukuoro Living Dictionary, which was created in 2013 by Kurt Erwin, Maynard Henry, Johnny Rudolph, Greg Anderson, and K. David Harrison. You can also visit our YouTube channel to see our videos in one place.
This is not a complete record of all work carried out on the Nukuoro language. For instance, much of the work carried out by Tobias Soulik and the Carrolls has inspired and formed the foundation of our work, but is not able to be reproduced here due to copyright issues or loss of recordings and notes. We are currently working to make Tobias and Vern's work available online: the content of the Nukuoro Lexicon (Carroll & Soulik 1973) is being integrated into the Living Dictionary, and the Nukuoro Stories (Carroll & Soulik 1980) are being uploaded to our Stories tab.
If you would like to be a part of the project, or have questions about any of the materials on this site, please contact us.
Where is Nukuoro spoken?
Nukuoro is spoken on Nukuoro Atoll, an outlying island of the Federated States of Micronesia, and there are large communities in Pohnpei, Guam, and the United States. Nukuoro is a Polynesian Outlier language, which means it is spoken outside of the Polynesian triangle (the area that lies between New Zealand, Hawai'i, and Easter Island). It is closely related to its neighbor Kapingamarangi, the only other Polynesian language spoken in Micronesia.