The South Bird's Head or South Doberai languages are three
families
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. Ideal ...
of
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 ...
. They form part of the
Trans–New Guinea languages
Trans–New Guinea (TNG) is an extensive family of Papuan languages spoken on the island of New Guinea and neighboring islands ‒ corresponding to the country Papua New Guinea as well as parts of Indonesia.
Trans–New Guinea is the third-la ...
in the classifications of
Malcolm Ross (2005) and Timothy Usher (2020), though Pawley and Hammarström (2018) do not consider them to be part of Trans–New Guinea.
However, according to
Dryer (2022), based on a preliminary quantitative analysis of data from the
ASJP database, South Bird's Head languages are likely to be a subgroup of Trans–New Guinea.
Languages
The languages are as follows,
Kokoda
Kokoda is a station town in the Oro Province of Papua New Guinea. It is famous as the northern end of the Kokoda Track, site of the eponymous Kokoda Track campaign of World War II. In that campaign, it had strategic significance because it had th ...
(Tarof, Kasuweri)
*** Arandai
**** Kemberano (Weriagar, Barau)
**** Dombano (Tomu)
Noting low cognacy rates, Holton and Klamer (2018) tentatively consider the following three language groups to each be independent language families, pending further evidence.[Usher, Timothy]
New Guinea World, North Berau Gulf
/ref>
Pronouns
The pronouns are:
:
3sg *ni is reconstructable for SBH proper. There appears to be both a plural vowel change from *a to *i, as in proto-TNG, and a plural suffix *-ri.
Cognates
Below are cognates in Nuclear South Bird's Head languages ( Arandai, Kokoda
Kokoda is a station town in the Oro Province of Papua New Guinea. It is famous as the northern end of the Kokoda Track, site of the eponymous Kokoda Track campaign of World War II. In that campaign, it had strategic significance because it had th ...
, Kemberano, Kaburi, Kais, Puragi) demonstrating their relatedness, as listed by Holton & Klamer (2018):[de Vries, Lourens. 2004. ''A Short Grammar of Inanwatan: An endangered language of the Bird’s Head of Papua, Indonesia''. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.]
:
Morphology
Except for the outlier languages Konda and Yahadian, all South Bird's Head languages have nouns classified according to masculine and feminine genders, which are determined with final vowel quality.
Syntax
Unlike many other languages of the Bird's Head Peninsula
The Bird's Head Peninsula ( Indonesian: ''Kepala Burung'', nl, Vogelkop) or Doberai Peninsula (''Semenanjung Doberai''), is a large peninsula that makes up the northwest portion of the island of New Guinea, comprising the Indonesian provinces ...
which display SVO word order SVO may refer to:
* Saturn Valley Online, an EarthBound MMORPG
* Sheremetyevo International Airport, one three major airports serving Moscow, Russia, IATA Airport Code
* Social value orientations, a psychological construct
* Sparse voxel octree, a ...
(such as Abun, Mpur, Maibrat, West Bird's Head, and others), the South Bird's Head languages have SOV word order SOV may refer to:
* SOV, Service Operations Vessel
* SOV, a former ticker symbol for Sovereign Bank
* SOV, a legal cryptocurrency created by the Sovereign Currency Act of 2018 of the Republic of the Marshall Islands
* SOV, the National Rail statio ...
.
Further reading
*
*Cowan, H. K. J. 1953. ''Voorlopige Resultaten van een Ambtelijk Taalonderzoek in Nieuw-Guinea entative Results of a Governmental Linguistic Study in New Guinea'. ’S-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff.
*Galis, Klaas Wilhelm. 1955. Talen en dialecten van Nederlands Nieuw-Guinea anguages and dialects of Netherlands New Guinea ''Tijdschrift Nieuw-Guinea'' 16: 109–118, 134–145, 161–178.
*Smits, Leo and Clemens L. Voorhoeve. 1998. ''The J.C. Anceaux Collection of Wordlists of Irian Jaya Languages B: Non-Austronesian (Papuan) languages (Part II)''. Leiden-Jakarta: Department of Cultures and Languages of Southeast Asia and Oceania.
References
*
External links
East South Bird's Head
New Guinea World.
{{Papuan languages
Languages of Papua New Guinea
Berau Gulf languages