16 Facts About Papuan languages

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.

The concept of Papuan languages speaking Melanesians as distinct from Austronesian-speaking Melanesians was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892.

The majority of the Papuan languages are spoken on the island of New Guinea, with a number spoken in the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville Island and the Solomon Islands to the east, and in Halmahera, Timor and the Alor archipelago to the west.

The largest family posited for the Papuan region is the Trans–New Guinea phylum, consisting of the majority of Papuan languages and running mainly along the highlands of New Guinea.

Since perhaps only a quarter of Papuan languages have been studied in detail, linguists' understanding of the relationships between them will continue to be revised.

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Extinct Tambora and the East Papuan languages have not been addressed, except to identify Yele as an Austronesian language.

For example, several of the main branches of his Trans–New Guinea phylum have no vocabulary in common with other Trans–New Guinea Papuan languages, and were classified as Trans–New Guinea because they are similar grammatically.

However, there are many Austronesian Papuan languages that are grammatically similar to Trans–New Guinea Papuan languages due to the influence of contact and bilingualism.

Similarly, several groups that do have substantial basic vocabulary in common with Trans–New Guinea Papuan languages are excluded from the phylum because they do not resemble it grammatically.

Wurm believed the Papuan languages arrived in several waves of migration with some of the earlier languages being related to the Australian languages, a later migration bringing the West Papuan, Torricelli and the East Papuan languages and a third wave bringing the most recent pre-Austronesian migration, the Trans–New Guinea family.

However, Ross argues that Papuan languages have closed-class pronoun systems, which are resistant to borrowing, and in any case that the massive number of languages with similar pronouns in a family like Trans–New Guinea preclude borrowing as an explanation.

The Reef Islands – Santa Cruz languages of Wurm's East Papuan phylum were a potential 24th family, but subsequent work has shown them to be highly divergent Austronesian languages as well.

Søren Wichmann accepts the following 109 groups as coherent Papuan languages families, based on computational analyses performed by the Automated Similarity Judgment Program combined with Harald Hammarstrom's classification.

Papuan languages believed that it was naive to expect to find a single Papuan or Australian language family when New Guinea and Australia had been a single landmass for most of their human history, having been separated by the Torres Strait only 8000 years ago, and that a deep reconstruction would likely include languages from both.

West Papuan, Lower Mamberamo, and most Torricelli languages are all left-headed, as well as the languages of New Britain and New Ireland.

Tonal Papuan languages include the Sko, Lepki, Kaure, Kembra, Lakes Plain, and Keuw languages.