The East Geelvink Bay or East Cenderawasih languages are a

language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in hist ...

of a dozen Papuan languages along the eastern coast of Geelvink Bay in Indonesian Papua, which is also known as Sarera Bay or Cenderawasih.

Languages

The East Geelvink Bay languages are: * Turunggare, Burate * Barapasi * Bauzi– Demisa, Nisa-Anasi (Bapu) *Central ** Sirami River: Kofei– Sauri, Tefaro ** Woria Of these, only Turunggare, Barapasi, and Bauzi are known well enough to demonstrate a relationship, though they are all lexically similar (> 60%). The unclassified

Kehu language Keuw (Keu, Kehu) is an unclassified language of New Guinea. Keuw is spoken in a swampy lowland region along the Poronai River in Keuw village (kampung) of Wapoga District, Nabire Regency, Papua province, Indonesia. According to oral folklore, ...

, spoken between Turunggare and Burate, may turn out to be East Geelvink Bay as wel

Bauzi is the best documented East Geelvink Bay language, but may or may not be representative of the Geelvink Bay family as a whole.

Classification

A relationship between Yawa languages, Yawa, spoken on Yapen Island, and the East Geelvink Bay languages was tentatively proposed by C. L. Voorhoeve in 1975 in a proposal he called Geelvink Bay. The hypothesis was taken up by

Stephen Wurm Stephen Adolphe Wurm ( hu, Wurm István Adolf, ; 19 August 1922 – 24 October 2001) was a Hungarian-born Australian linguist. Early life Wurm was born in Budapest, the second child to the German-speaking Adolphe Wurm and the Hungarian-sp ...

, who developed it as part of an initial attempt to classify the Papuan languages; however, the relationship would be a distant one, and later linguists such as

Mark Donohue Mark Neary Donohue Jr. (March 18, 1937 – August 19, 1975), nicknamed "Captain Nice," and later "Dark Monohue," was an American race car driver and engineer known for his ability to set up his own race car as well as driving it to victories. D ...

considered Yawa to be a

language isolate Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The num ...

. Clouse (1997) removed the

Lakes Plain languages The Lakes Plain languages are a family of Papuan languages, spoken in the Lakes Plain of Indonesian New Guinea. They are notable for being heavily tonal and for their lack of nasal consonants. Classification The Lakes Plain languages were tenta ...

of the upper

Mamberamo River The Mamberamo (''Indonesian: Sungai Mamberamo'') is the second longest river on the island of New Guinea, after Sepik River (1,146 km) and third largest in Oceania by discharge (5,500 m3/s) volume after Fly River (7,500 m3/s) and Sepik (7,000 m3/ ...

in the interior of Papua from Trans–New Guinea, where Würm had placed them, and by comparison with Bauzi and Demisa proposes them to be a sister family of the East Geelvink Bay languages. Basic vocabulary cognates that Clouse suggests to connect the two stocks include: However, in his 2005 classification based on comparative evidence from pronouns, Malcolm Ross treats all three groups as separate families, with Yawa tentatively placed in an extended West Papuan family.

Typology

Verbal morphology in the East Geelvink Bay family is less complex than that of

Tor-Kwerba languages The Foja Range languages, or Tor–Kwerba in more limited scope, are a family of about two dozen Papuan languages. They are named after the Foja Mountains of western New Guinea. Languages All the languages had been part of Stephen Wurm's 1975 ...

, but is more complex than that of the

Pronouns

The pronouns Ross reconstructs for proto–East Geelvink Bay are, :

Basic vocabulary

Basic vocabulary of selected East Cenderawasih languages ( Barapasi, Bauzi, Demisa, Tunggare) listed in Foley (2018): : The following basic vocabulary words are from Clouse (1997) and Voorhoeve (1975), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database: :

References

External links

East Geelvink Bay languages database at TransNewGuinea.org
{{Language families Languages of western New Guinea Cenderawasih Bay Language families Papuan languages