ABSTRACT
The island of Nauna is just a tiny speck far out in the waters of the South Pacific, and it is not marked on many maps. Yet, if its smallness has made the island insignificant for cartographers, to me it was one of its merits and a reason for including it into my study. Nauna has a diameter of about one kilometre, is of volcanic origin and lies in very deep waters. It is about 2 degrees south of the equator, easternmost in the Manus Province, and about forty kilometres of open water separate it from the nearest inhabited islands, Rambutso, Pak and Tong (see Map 3). At the beginning of this century, Nauna was completely depopulated (Parkinson 1907:392) but today it has a population of more than one hundred Matankors. 1 They speak the Nauna language, which is an Austronesian language related to the languages on neighbouring Pak, Tong and Rambutso, though the Nauna language is hard to understand for those islanders. The word Nauna itself is a Titan pronunciation of the local name. In the Nauna language, the word ‘Nauna’ sounds rather like ‘N-h-n’.
