The Kwalean or Humene–Uare languages are a small family of
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 ...
spoken in the "
Bird's Tail" (southeastern peninsula) of New Guinea. They are classified within the
Southeast Papuan branch of Trans–New Guinea.
The Kwalean languages are spoken in
Rigo District,
Central Province,
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 ...
.
Languages
The languages are
Humene,
Uare (Kwale) and recently extinct
Mulaha. It is not clear if Mulaha was an outlier, or as close to the others as they are to each other.
Classification
Humene and Uare are quite close (70% basic vocabulary), Mulaha more distant (22% with Uare).
The Kwalean family is not accepted by
Søren Wichmann (2013), who splits it into two separate groups, namely
Humene–
Uare and
Mulaha.
[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.
Proto-language
Phonemes
Usher (2020) reconstructs the consonant inventory of Humene and Uare as follows:
[New Guinea World, Humene–Uare]
/ref>
:
The *k is rare.
Vowels are *i *e *ɛ *a *ɔ *o *u.
Pronouns
Usher (2020) reconstructs the pronouns of Humene–Uare as:[
:
]
Basic vocabulary
Some lexical reconstructions by Usher (2020) are:[
:
]
Vocabulary comparison
The following basic vocabulary words are from Dutton (1970) (with additional data for Uare from 1988 SIL field notes), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database.
Evolution
Kwale
Kwale is a small town in and the capital of Kwale County, Kenya. It is located at around ; 30 km southwest of Mombasa and 15 km inland. The town has an urban population of 10,063 (2019 census). It is next to the Shimba Hills Natio ...
reflexes of proto-Trans-New Guinea (pTNG) etyma are:
References
Further reading
* Ross, Malcolm. 2014
Proto-Kwalean
''TransNewGuinea.org''.
External links
* Timothy Usher, New Guinea World
Owen Stanley Range
* (ibid.
Proto–Humene–Uare
{{Papuan languages
Owen Stanley Range languages
Languages of Central Province (Papua New Guinea)