The Ramu–Lower Sepik Lower Sepik–Ramu languages are a proposed

family Family (from la, familia) is a group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or affinity (by marriage or other relationship). The purpose of the family is to maintain the well-being of its members and of society. Idea ...

of about 35

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 ...

spoken in the

Ramu The Ramu River is a major river in northern Papua New Guinea. The headwaters of the river are formed in the Kratke Range from where it then travels about northwest to the Bismarck Sea. Along the Ramu's course, it receives numerous tributaries ...

and

Sepik The Sepik () is the longest river on the island of New Guinea, and the second largest in Oceania by discharge volume after the Fly River. The majority of the river flows through the Papua New Guinea (PNG) provinces of Sandaun (formerly West Se ...

river basins 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 ...

. These languages tend to have simple phonologies, with few consonants or vowels and usually no tones.

Overview

Two primary branches are typically accepted: * Lower Sepik (Nor–Pondo) *

However, Foley (2018) also considers the possibility of

Grass Poaceae () or Gramineae () is a large and nearly ubiquitous family of monocotyledonous flowering plants commonly known as grasses. It includes the cereal grasses, bamboos and the grasses of natural grassland and species cultivated in lawns a ...

being a third primary branch. Usher classifies some of the Grass languages (the

Keram languages The Keram languages of New Guinea are part of the Ramu family. They are the Mongol–Langam languages and a pair of languages sometimes thought to belong to the Grass family. (See Grass languages for the history of classification.) Foley (2018) ...

) as being coordinate with Ramu, and some (the Porapora languages) as being part of Ramu. The relatedness of the three branches are held together by morphological evidence, as very few lexical cognates are shared among them. The family was proposed by William A. Foley and accepted by Malcolm Ross. Its two branches,

and Lower Sepik, had belonged to

Donald Laycock Donald Laycock (1936–1988) was an Australian linguist and anthropologist. He is best remembered for his work on the languages of Papua New Guinea. Biography He was a graduate of University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia and later ...

's now-defunct 1973 Sepik–Ramu proposal. If related, they are not close. The connection is not accepted by Timothy Usher. Based on oral histories of the Lower Sepik peoples, which record that Yimas is spoken near their homeland, as well as the conservative nature of Yimas itself, Ross suggests that the speakers of Proto–Ramu – Lower Sepik may have lived in the northern foothills of the New Guinea highlands and moved into the Sepik Basin as the inland Sepik Sea started to recede six thousand years ago.

Classification

The Ramu-Lower Sepik family is not accepted by

Søren Wichmann Søren Wichmann (born 1964) is a Danish linguist specializing in historical linguistics, linguistic typology, Mesoamerican languages, and epigraphy. Since June 2016, he has been employed as a University Lecturer at Leiden University Centre for Li ...

(2013), who splits it into 4-5 separate groups.Wichmann, Søren. 2013
A classification of Papuan languages
In: Hammarström, Harald and Wilco van den Heuvel (eds.), History, contact and classification of Papuan languages (Language and Linguistics in Melanesia, Special Issue 2012), 313-386. Port Moresby: Linguistic Society of Papua New Guinea. Foley (2018) accepts that Ramu and Lower Sepik are related on the basis of morphological evidence, although they are typologically still very different from each other. It is also accepted by Glottolog. Grass languages are lexically divergent, sharing very few cognates with the other Ramu languages. Foley (2018: 205) leaves open the possibility of Grass being a third branch of the Lower Sepik-Ramu family, with Lower Sepik and

being sister branches.

Typology

Although the Lower Sepik and

groups are related, Ramu is morphologically much simpler than Lower Sepik due to differing historical contact scenarios. The Ndu, Yuat, and

groups all have relatively simple morphology, while the Lower Sepik family has some of the most complex morphology seen among Papuan languages. Foley posits that morphological simplification among these disparate languages families had occurred due to

creolization Creolization is the process through which creole languages and cultures emerge. Creolization was first used by linguists to explain how contact languages become creole languages, but now scholars in other social sciences use the term to describe ne ...

through widespread language contact. He notes that the most spread-out languages with wide geographical distributions are also the ones with the simplest morphologies:

Abau Abau is a Papuan language spoken in southern Sandaun Province of Papua New Guinea, primarily along the border with Indonesia. In 2002, there were estimated to be between 4,500 and 5,000 speakers, and this number does not appear to have declined s ...

, Iwam, Kwanga, Ambulas, Boiken, Iatmul, Ap Ma, Mikarew, Adjora, and Rao (these are all

and

languages).

Pronouns

The internal coherence of the two branches, Ramu and Lower Sepik, is based on similar

pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not c ...

paradigms, which however do not connect the two branches to each other. Foley was able to connect them lexically, but the primary evidence for a Ramu – Lower Sepik family is a number of irregular

plural The plural (sometimes abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This de ...

markers shared by the Lower Sepik languages and the Ramu languages Watam and Bosman. The pronouns themselves have little in common except for 3sg *man (proto-Ramu) ~ *mɨn (proto–Lower Sepik) and the non-singular affix *-ŋk- ( dual in Ramu and

paucal In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and other languages present number categories of ...

in Lower Sepik: See Ramu languages#Pronouns and Lower Sepik languages#Pronouns for details). Whereas the Ramu languages have *ŋgo ‘1sg’ and *nu ‘2sg’, the Lower Sepik languages have *ama ‘1sg’ and *mi ‘2sg’. :

Lexical comparison

Reconstructions of proto- Lower Sepik and proto- Ottilien (proto-Watam-Awar-Gamay, a Lower Ramu branch) from Foley (2005) are as follows. Uncertain reconstructions are marked by question marks following the forms. : Lexical resemblances are few. The most likely lexical cognates are ‘tongue’, ‘ear’, ‘lime’, and ‘eat’. :

Footnotes

References

* *

External links

Lower Sepik-Ramu languages database at TransNewGuinea.org
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ramu-Lower Sepik languages Proposed language families Papuan languages Languages of Madang Province Languages of East Sepik Province