The Bullroarer Atlas

POLY2026-002 - ethnographic attestation

Samoan children

Samoa - Samoan Islands - Oceania - Polynesia

Play / practical

A slender New Guinea bull-roarer standing in for Oceania, its plain pale wood banded near the handle with a dark diamond-lattice design: Buck...
Representative image. A slender New Guinea bull-roarer standing in for Oceania, its plain pale wood banded near the handle with a dark diamond-lattice design: Buck (1930) describes the Samoan lango mumu in text only, and no usable Polynesian image has been found. © The Trustees of the British Museum (E/Oc1925-0213-4) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

lango mumu English

Source term: bull roarer

lango mumu — Samoan name for the leaflet toy bull-roarer; in Buck's orthography lango is the fly, and the toy borrows the name of the buzzing fly whose sound it imitates.

Etymology. The Samoan toy name uses insect sound imagery; exact force of `mumu` is not separately unpacked in the current source lane. (high confidence)

Among the coconut-leaflet toys Samoan children made for themselves, alongside a windmill (pe'ape'a) and a spinner (moamoa), was a bull-roarer they called lango mumu — the name of the buzzing fly, taken from the humming the toy made when whirled. Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter Buck) recorded it in his 1930 survey of Samoan material culture for the Bishop Museum, noting it was built the same way as the leaf toys he had documented at Aitutaki. In his summary of Samoan sound-making he placed it with the jew's harp and the whistle as one of the children's instruments, all easily made from the leaves of plants.

These included the windmill (pe'ape'a), spinner (moamoa), and bull roarer (lango mumu). The bull roarer from its humming noise takes the name of the buzzing fly.

Te Rangi Hiroa (P. H. Buck), Samoan Material Culture, Bishop Museum Bulletin 75 (1930), p. 552
Object
Buck lists lango mumu among coconut-leaflet toys and explicitly calls it a bull roarer whose name comes from its humming fly-like sound.
Function
Children's coconut-leaflet toy bullroarer; included because Buck explicitly calls it a bull roarer, but it is not evidence for a carved restricted rhombus.
Map confidence
medium - representative country anchor at Apia, Upolu, Samoa; not an exact findspot
Source location
p. 552; index p. 552

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