Buru Language

Buru (/ˈbu.ru/) is an extinct Oayi language and the reference member of the Buru Family, known mainly through fragmentary comparative forms and later scholarly reconstruction. It preserves older Oayi root shapes more clearly than its daughters, with a mostly (C)V(C) rhythm, closed lexical roots, weak penultimate stress in citation forms, and a compact vowel system /i e ɨ a o u/. Its consonant inventory includes /m n ŋ p b t k kʼ ʔ s x h β r l j w/, reflecting older Oayi pressure consonants in reduced form but lacking Tsang’hi’s productive tonal grid and Muhyar’s creaky-vowel development. Final nasals retain faint traces of the ancestral high, middle, and low release pattern, though these are no longer fully contrastive. Morphosyntactically, Buru is reconstructed as lightly agglutinative and mostly suffixing, with head-final compounds and conservative roots later split across Huni, Kasa, and Pava.