מוטו

Motu is the indigenous Austronesian language of the Motu people of the Central Province of Papua New Guinea, centred on the Hanuabada villages near Port Moresby. The pure form has only ~14K active speakers, but Motu is the lexical source for Hiri Motu (hmo), the simplified pidgin that became one of PNG's three official languages. Motu has full Austronesian morphology including subject/object person markers, alienable/inalienable possession, and the characteristic Oceanic pronoun system, all of which Hiri Motu drastically simplified in the colonial trade context. Lister-Turner & Clark's 1931 grammar remains authoritative.