Indo-Pacific is a hypothetical language macrofamily proposed in 1971 by

Joseph Greenberg Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Life Early life and education Joseph Greenberg was born on ...

and now believed to be spurious. It grouped together the Papuan languages of

New Guinea New Guinea (; Hiri Motu: ''Niu Gini''; id, Papua, or , historically ) is the world's second-largest island with an area of . Located in Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is separated from Australia by the wide Torr ...

and

Melanesia Melanesia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It extends from Indonesia's New Guinea in the west to Fiji in the east, and includes the Arafura Sea. The region includes the four independent countries of Fiji, Va ...

with the languages of the Andaman Islands (or at least Great Andamanese) and, tentatively, the languages of Tasmania, both of which are remote from New Guinea. The valid cognates Greenberg found turned out to be reflexes of the less extensive Trans–New Guinea family. Recently the

Kusunda language Kusunda or ''Kusanda'' (endonym Mihaq ) is a language isolate spoken by a few among the Kusunda people in western and central Nepal. As of 2022, it only has a single fluent speaker, although there are efforts underway to keep the language alive. ...

(and possibly other unclassificated languages), which is generally seen as a language isolate, is also included in the Indo-Pacific proposal. Greenberg did not include "

Australian Australian(s) may refer to: Australia * Australia, a country * Australians, citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia ** European Australians ** Anglo-Celtic Australians, Australians descended principally from British colonists ** Aboriginal A ...

" in his original 1971 proposal.

Proposal

The Indo-Pacific proposal, grouping the

non-Austronesian languages The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non- Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geogr ...

of New Guinea with certain languages spoken on islands to the east and west of New Guinea, was first made by Greenberg in 1971. Greenberg's supporter

Merritt Ruhlen Merritt Ruhlen (May 10, 1944 – January 29, 2021) was an American linguist who worked on the classification of languages and what this reveals about the origin and evolution of modern humans. Amongst other linguists, Ruhlen's work was recognized ...

considers Indo-Pacific an extremely diverse and ancient family, far older than Austronesian, which reflects a migration from southeast Asia that began only 6,000 years ago; he notes that New Guinea was inhabited by modern humans at least 40,000 years ago, and possibly 10,000 to 15,000 years earlier than that.Ruhlen, Merritt. ''The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue''. John Wiley & Sons, Inc: New York, 1994

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (; 25 January 1922 – 31 August 2018) was an Italian geneticist. He was a population geneticist who taught at the University of Parma, the University of Pavia and then at Stanford University. Works Schooling and po ...

sees Indo-Pacific as a very heterogenous family of 700 languages and suggests that it may be more than 40,000 years old.Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca. ''Genes, Peoples, and Languages''. University of California Press: Berkeley, 2001

Reception

Greenberg's proposal was based on rough estimation of lexical similarity and typological similarity and has not reached a stage where it can be confirmed by the standard

comparative method In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards t ...

, including the reconstruction of a protolanguage. The languages of Tasmania are extinct and so poorly attested that many historical linguists regard them as unclassifiable.

Roger Blench Roger Marsh Blench (born August 1, 1953) is a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and is based in Cambridge, England. He researches, publishes, and work ...

has dismissed the Indo-Pacific proposal as improbable, observing that while it "purported to be a purely linguistic exercise...it conveniently swept up all the languages of the crinklyhaired populations in the region that were not clearly Austronesian." He writes that despite decades of further research into

Papuan languages The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non- Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geogr ...

and prehistory, Indo-Pacific is still not accepted by specialists and that it "only exists in the eye of the believer."

George van Driem George "Sjors" van Driem (born 1957) is a Dutch linguist associated with the University of Bern, where he is the chair of Historical Linguistics and directs the Linguistics Institute. Education * Leiden University, 1983–1987 (PhD, ''A Gramma ...

(2001) responds as follows: Since Greenberg's work, the languages of New Guinea have been intensively studied by Stephen Wurm. Wurm's Trans–New Guinea languages family includes about 70 percent of the languages Greenberg included in Indo-Pacific, though the internal classification is entirely different. Wurm states that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese, West Papuan (which is not part of Trans–New Guinea), and certain languages of Timor "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity ..in a number of instances", but considers this to be due to a linguistic substratum rather than a direct relationship. Pawley (2008) is the only thorough review of the proposal. He found that all branches of Indo-Pacific except Tasmanian and Andamanese include languages from Trans–New Guinea, and that this explains the more reasonable cognates that Greenberg proposed, but because these Trans–New Guinea languages are mixed in with languages from other families in those branches, cognates linking the branches do not provide support for Greenberg's proposal that all Papuan languages are related.

Subdivision

According to Greenberg, Indo-Pacific consists of fourteen families, not counting a few which he could not classify. He suggested a tentative sub-classification into seven groups, listed in bold below. Some languages have not been identified. *

Tasmanian ) , nickname = , image_map = Tasmania in Australia.svg , map_caption = Location of Tasmania in AustraliaCoordinates: , subdivision_type = Country , subdi ...

* Great Andamanese: Southern: Chariar, Puchikwar, Kede, Kol, Juwoi; Northern: Beada, Bogijiab, Bale, Biada *Nuclear **Central ***Kapauku–Baliem **** Kapauku (Ekari, Ekagi),

Moni Moni or Mone ( Kamkata-vari: ''Mone''/''Mune''), also known as Mandi (from Prasun) was, after Imra, the second-most important god in the pre-Islamic pantheon of the Nuristani people. With his breath, Imra created Moni and Gish. Moni was believe ...

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Proposal

Reception

Subdivision

Comparison

Lexical parallels

Lexical comparison

Notes

References

External links