The West Papuan languages are a proposed

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 h ...

of about two dozen

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 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 ...

(Vogelkop or Doberai Peninsula) of far western

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 ...

, the island of

Halmahera Halmahera, formerly known as Jilolo, Gilolo, or Jailolo, is the largest island in the Maluku Islands. It is part of the North Maluku province of Indonesia, and Sofifi, the capital of the province, is located on the west coast of the island. Ha ...

and its vicinity, spoken by about 220,000 people in all. It is not established if they constitute a proper linguistic family or an areal network of genetically unrelated families. The best known "West Papuan" language is

Ternate Ternate is a city in the Indonesian province of North Maluku and an island in the Maluku Islands. It was the ''de facto'' provincial capital of North Maluku before Sofifi on the nearby coast of Halmahera became the capital in 2010. It is off the ...

(50,000 native speakers) of the island of the same name, which is a regional lingua franca and which, along with neighboring

Tidore Tidore ( id, Kota Tidore Kepulauan, lit. "City of Tidore Islands") is a city, island, and archipelago in the Maluku Islands of eastern Indonesia, west of the larger island of Halmahera. Part of North Maluku Province, the city includes the island ...

, were the languages of the rival medieval

and

sultanates, famous for their role in the spice trade.

Languages

;West Papuan * North Halmahera (Halmahera – West Makian) **Core North Halmahera ** ''West Makian'' *'' Amberbaken (Mpur)'' * Yawa (Yapen) *West–Central Bird's Head ** West Bird's Head ** ''Abun'' **'' Maybrat (Central Bird's Head)'' *East Bird's Head ** ''Burmeso'' ** Hatam–Mansim (Hatam – Moi Brai) ** Mantion–Meax (Southeast Bird's Head)

History

The German linguist Wilhelm Schmidt first linked the West Bird's Head and North Halmahera languages in 1900. In 1957 H.K.J. Cowan linked them to the non-Austronesian languages of

Timor Timor is an island at the southern end of Maritime Southeast Asia, in the north of the Timor Sea. The island is divided between the sovereign states of East Timor on the eastern part and Indonesia on the western part. The Indonesian part, also ...

as well. Stephen Wurm believed that although traces of West Papuan languages were to be found in the languages of Timor, as well as those of Aru and

Great Andaman Great Andaman is the main archipelago of the Andaman Islands of India. It comprises seven major islands. From north to south, these are North Andaman, Interview Island, Middle Andaman, Long Island, Baratang Island, South Andaman, and Rutland Is ...

, this was due to a substratum and that these languages should be classified as Trans–New Guinea, Austronesian, and

Andamanese The Andamanese are the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands, part of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands union territory in the southeastern part of the Bay of Bengal in Southeast Asia. The Andamanese peoples are among the various groups ...

, respectively. Indeed, most of the languages of

East Nusa Tenggara East Nusa Tenggara ( id, Nusa Tenggara Timur – NTT; pt, Sonda Oriental) is the southernmost province of Indonesia. It comprises the eastern portion of the Lesser Sunda Islands, facing the Indian Ocean in the south and the Flores Sea in the nor ...

and Maluku appear to have some non-Austronesian influence. In 2005, Malcolm Ross made a tentative proposal, based on the forms of their pronouns, that the West Papuan languages form one of three branches of an

extended West Papuan The West Papuan languages are a proposed language family of about two dozen non-Austronesian languages of the Bird's Head Peninsula (Vogelkop or Doberai Peninsula) of far western New Guinea, the island of Halmahera and its vicinity, spoken by ab ...

family that also includes the

Yawa languages The Yawa languages, also known as Yapen languages, are a small family of two closely related Papuan languages, Yawa (or Yava) and Saweru, which are often considered to be divergent dialects of a single language (and thus a language isolate). ...

, and a newly proposed East Bird's Head – Sentani family as a third branch.

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)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. considers West Bird's Head, Abun, and Maybrat to form a unified family, but does not accept West Papuan as a coherent language family. Timothy Usher, also somewhat tentatively, accepts Yawa and East Bird's Head, but not Sentani, as part of West Papuan itself, so the family can remain under that name. Holton and Klamer (2018) do not unequivocally accept the unity of West Papuan, but note that certain proposals linking "West Papuan" groups together may eventually turn out to be fruitful. Ger Reesink suggests that the West Papuan family should be considered an areal network of unrelated linguistic families, noting the lack of adequate evidence for genetic relatedness.

Pronouns

The pronouns Ross reconstructs for proto-West Papuan are, : These are shared by the "core" West Papuan families. Hattam reflects only "I" and "thou", and Amberbaken only "thou", "you", and "she". Ross's Extended West Papuan languages have forms in ''*d'' for "I" and ''*m'' for "we". (Most Yawa forms of "we" have ''m,'' such as ''imama,'' but they are too diverse for an easy reconstruction.) These are found in all branches of the family except for the Amberbaken isolate. Ross's West Papuan proper is distinguished from Yawa and EBH-Sentani in having forms like ''na'' or ''ni'' for the second-person singular ("thou")

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 ...

. :

Word order

Word order is SVO in the West Bird's Head family and in western

North Halmahera languages The North Halmahera languages are a family of languages spoken in the northern and eastern parts of the island of Halmahera and some neighboring islands in Indonesia. The southwestern part of the island is occupied by the unrelated South Halmaher ...

(

, West Makian, and

Sahu Sahu (Sahoo, or Shaw, or Shau, or Gupta, or Saha, or Saw, Shah). is a surname found in India and Pakistan. The meaning of the term "Sahu" may change from region to region.''. Usage In India, the surname is found among Gakhars, Marwadi, Janjuas, ...

; due to Austronesian influence). SVO word order is also present in the isolates Abun, Mpur, and Maibrat. The South Bird's Head family generally has SOV word order, although SVO word order is also permitted in transitive clauses. The Timor-Alor-Pantar languages also have verb-final word order.

Phonology

All Papuan languages of East Nusantara have five or more vowels. Abun and Mpur are fully tonal languages, with Mpur having 4 lexical tones, and Abun having 3 lexical tones. Meyah and Sougb are pitch-accent languages. All other languages of the

are non-tonal.Klamer, Marian; Ger Reesink; and Miriam van Staden. 2008. East Nusantara as a Linguistic Area. In Pieter Muysken (ed.), ''From linguistic areas to areal linguistics'', 95-149. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Of all the Papuan languages spoken in the Bird's Head Peninsula, Abun has the largest consonant inventory with 20 consonants, while neighboring Maybrat has the smallest with 11 consonants. Large consonant inventories similar to that of Abun are also found in the

, such as Tobelo, Tidore, and Sahu.

Lexical comparison

Basic vocabulary of two West Bird's Head languages (''WBH'') ( Moi and Tehit) and three language isolates ( Mpur, Abun, Maibrat), quoted by Holton & Klamer (2018) from Miedema & Reesink (2004: 34) and (Reesink 2005: 202); these show diverse non-cognate forms among Papuan languages of the

: : Lexical lookalikes between

(''NH'') ( Galela and Pagu) and West Bird's Head languages (''WBH'') ( Moi and Tehit) from Voorhoeve (1988: 194), as quoted by Holton & Klamer (2018):Voorhoeve, Clemens L. 1988. The languages of the northern Halmaheran stock. In: Geoffrey P. Smith, Tom Dutton, Clemens L. Voorhoeve, Stephen Schooling, Janice Schooling, Robert Conrad, Ron Lewis, Stephen A. Wurm and Theo Baumann (eds.), ''Papers in New Guinea Linguistics'' 26: 181–209. : The lexical data below is from the Trans-New Guinea database and Usher (2020), unless noted otherwise.

References

* *

External links

West Papuan sound comparisons
{{DEFAULTSORT:West Papuan Languages Proposed language families Languages of western New Guinea Papuan languages