Today's settlement area of the Bunak people is 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 communities often live side by side in coexistence. The Bunak people are isolated linguistically and socially, since the adjacent Kemak people to the north, the Mambai people in the east, the Tetun people in the south and west and the Atoni people speak to the west speak Malayo-Polynesian languages. Bunak is considered as being one of the Papuan languages, even though there are strong influences from the neighboring languages. The other Timorese Papuan languages are spoken in the east of Timor. Because of the language diversity in the region, the Bunak people are able to speak at least one of the Malayo-Polynesian languages fluently (in East Timor, Tetum is the lingua franca), while their surrounding neighbors rarely learn the Bunak language. In the hard-to-reach mountains, the townships of the Bunak people are relatively isolated from their neighboring communities. In East Timor, their area expands to the west of Manufahi District and in West Timor (Indonesia) towards the east of the Belu Regency and Malaka Regency.