The Ram languages are a small group of 3 languages spoken in
Sandaun Province
Sandaun Province (formerly West Sepik Province) is the northwesternmost mainland Provinces of Papua New Guinea, province of Papua New Guinea. It covers an area of 35,920 km2 (13868 m2) and has a population of 248,411 (2011 census). The capita ...
,
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; , ; tpi, Papua Niugini; ho, Papua Niu Gini), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea ( tpi, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; ho, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), is a country i ...
. They are spoken directly to the northeast of the
Yellow River languages
The Yellow River languages are a small family of clearly related languages,
: Namia (Namie), Ak, and Awun.
They are classified among the Sepik languages of northern Papua New Guinea.
Namia is the most divergent Yellow River language.
Distr ...
and directly to the south of the
Wapei languages
The Wapei languages constitute a branch of the Torricelli language family according to Laycock (1975) (quoted from Foley 2018). Glottolog does not accept this grouping. They are spoken in mountainous regions of eastern Sandaun Province, Papua New ...
, both of which are also Sepik groups. ''Ram'' is the word for 'man' in the languages that make up this group.
The languages are,
*
Awtuw
*Karawa–Pouye
**
Karawa
**
Pouye (Bouye)
They are classified among the
Sepik languages
The Sepik or Sepik River languages are a family of some 50 Papuan languages spoken in the Sepik river basin of northern Papua New Guinea, proposed by Donald Laycock in 1965 in a somewhat more limited form than presented here. They tend to have ...
of northern
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; , ; tpi, Papua Niugini; ho, Papua Niu Gini), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea ( tpi, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; ho, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), is a country i ...
.
Awtuw is the best documented Ram language.
Pronouns
The pronouns Ross reconstructs for proto-Ram are:
:
Vocabulary comparison
The following basic vocabulary words are from Laycock (1968) and Foley (2005), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database:
:
References
*
{{Sepik languages
Languages of Sandaun Province
Yellow–Wanibe languages