Word.ws English Dictionary

bus kanaka

bus kanaka noun: an uncivilized person; a person who follows a traditional rather than a modern lifestyle.

Noun

bus kanaka (plural bus kanakas)

  1. (Papua-New-Guinea) An uncivilized person; a person who follows a traditional rather than a modern lifestyle.
    • […] for some more sophisticated coastal people there was merely the shame at being led by a bush kanaka, […]1965, The Papua-New Guinea Elections 1964
    • Fuyuge men recount with humor their initial encounters with life in Port Moresby during the 1950s. They speak of travelling to the coast in their bark-cloths and realising upon their arrival that they were inappropriately dressed: “We immediately felt bus kanaka [wild, uncivilized].”1999, Eric Hirsh, “Colonial Units and Ritual Units: Historical Transformations of Persons and Horizons in Highland Papua”, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, volume 41, number 4

Forms of bus kanaka

pluralbus kanakas
alternative formbush kanaka
alternative formbush-Kanaka

Origin of bus kanaka

Borrowed from Tok Pisin bus kanaka.

Questions about bus kanaka

What does bus kanaka mean?
Bus kanaka means an uncivilized person; a person who follows a traditional rather than a modern lifestyle.
What part of speech is bus kanaka?
Bus kanaka is a noun.
What is the plural of bus kanaka?
The plural of bus kanaka is bus kanakas.

Words near bus kanaka in the dictionary

  1. bus factors
  2. bus fare
  3. bus fares
  4. bus girl
  5. bus girls
  6. bus kanaka
  7. bus kanakas
  8. bus lane
  9. bus lanes
  10. bus line
  11. bus lines

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bus kanaka (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “bus kanaka.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bus_kanaka. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.