Bunak people
Holy House in Fatuc Laran, Lactos, Cova Lima District, East Timor where 90% of the population are Bunak people.
|
|
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 84,000 | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Timor: | |
 East Timor
|
61,000 |
 Indonesia (West Timor) |
23,000 |
| Languages | |
| Bunak language, Indonesian language, Portuguese language | |
| Religion | |
| Animism (originally), Catholic (predominantly) | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Papuan people, Mambai people (Timor) | |
The Bunak (also known as Bunaq, Buna', Bunake) are an ethnic group that live in the mountainous region of central Timor, split between the political boundary between West Timor, Indonesia, particularly in Lamaknen District and East Timor. Their language, Bunak language, is one of the few on Timor which is not an Austronesian language, but rather a Papuan language like groups on New Guinea. It is usually put in the proposed language group Trans–New Guinea. They are surrounded by groups which speak Malayo-Polynesian languages, like the Atoni and the Tetum.
According to Languages of the World (Voegelin and Voegelin, 1977), there were about 100,000 speakers of the language, split evenly between the two nations.
Today's settlement area of the Bunak people are located in the mountains of central Timor, ranging from the East Timorese town of Maliana in the north to the Timor Sea in the south, where both the Bunak and the Tetun Dili communities often live side by side in coexistence. The Bunak people are isolated linguistically and socially, since the adjacent Kemak people are in the north, the Mambai people in the east, Tetun Dili people in the south and west and the rest of the Atoni people speak Malayo-Polynesian languages in the west. While Bunak are considered as one of the Papuan languages, even though there are strong influences of neighboring languages. Papuan languages are usually spoken only in the far east of Timor. Because of the language diversity in the region, the Bunak people are able to dominate at least one of the Malayo-Polynesian languages fluently (in East Timor, Tetum language is the lingua franca), while their surrounding neighbors rarely learn Bunak language. In the hard reach mountains, the settlements of the Bunak people are relatively isolated from their neighboring communities. In East Timor, their settlement area expands to the west of Manufahi District and in the West Timor of Indonesia towards the east of the Belu Regency and Malaka Regency.
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Wikipedia