The Kalam languages are a small

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 languages in the

Madang Madang (old German name: ''Friedrich-Wilhelmshafen'') is the capital of Madang Province and is a town with a population of 27,420 (in 2005) on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. It was first settled by the Germans in the 19th century. Hist ...

stock of New Guinea. The languages are: :

Kalam ''ʿIlm al-Kalām'' ( ar, عِلْم الكَلام, literally "science of discourse"), usually foreshortened to ''Kalām'' and sometimes called "Islamic scholastic theology" or "speculative theology", is the philosophical study of Islamic doc ...

– Tai, Kobon. They are famous for having perhaps the smallest numbers of

lexical verb In linguistics a lexical verb or main verb is a member of an open class of verbs that includes all verbs except auxiliary verbs. Lexical verbs typically express action, state, or other predicate meaning. In contrast, auxiliary verbs express gramm ...

s of any languages in the world, with somewhere in the range of 100 to 120 verbs in the case of Kobon. It is as yet unclear whether the Gants language is most closely related to the Kalam languages or is one of the

Sogeram languages The Sogeram languages are a family of languages in the Madang stock of New Guinea. They are named after the Sogeram River.Usher, Timothy. 2020Sogeram River ''New Guinea World''. In earlier classifications, such as that of Wurm, most of the Soger ...

References

{{Madang languages Languages of Papua New Guinea West Madang languages