The East Pauwasi languages are a

family Family (from ) is a Social group, group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or Affinity (law), affinity (by marriage or other relationship). It forms the basis for social order. Ideally, families offer predictabili ...

Papuan languages The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands in Indonesia, Solomon Islands, and East Timor. It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply ...

spoken in north-central

New Guinea New Guinea (; Hiri Motu: ''Niu Gini''; , fossilized , also known as Papua or historically ) is the List of islands by area, world's second-largest island, with an area of . Located in Melanesia in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is ...

, on both sides of the Indonesia-Papua New Guinea border. They may either form part of a larger Pauwasi language family along with the

Western Pauwasi languages Western may refer to: Places *Western, Nebraska, a village in the US *Western, New York, a town in the US * Western Creek, Tasmania, a locality in Australia * Western Junction, Tasmania, a locality in Australia *Western world, countries that ...

, or they could form an independent language family.

Languages

According to Timothy Usher, the East Pauwasi languages, which seem to form a

dialect chain A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated variet ...

, are:NewGuineaWorld
/ref> ;East Pauwasi River * Zorop (Yafi) *Emem–Karkar ** Emem (Emumu) ***North Emem ***South Emem **

Karkar Karkar may refer to: * Karkar, Selseleh, a village in Iran *Karkar Island Karkar Island is an oval-shaped volcanic island located in the Bismarck Sea, about off the north coast of mainland Papua New Guinea in Madang Province, from which it is s ...

(Yuri) Usher also identified the Karkar (Yuri) language as Pauwasi.

Lexical reconstruction

Some lexical reconstructions of Proto-East Pauwasi by Usher (2020) are: :

Vocabulary comparison

The following basic vocabulary words are from Voorhoeve (1971, 1975), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database. The words cited constitute translation equivalents, whether they are cognate (e.g. ''məndai'', ''məndini'', ''mindimna'' for “head”) or not (e.g. ''kolk'', ''əndai'', ''gwane'' for “bone”). :

References

External links

Pauwasi languages database at TransNewGuinea.org
{{language families Pauwasi languages