Papuan languages

From Freepedia

The term Papuan languages refers to those languages of the western Pacific which are neither Austronesian nor Australian. That is, the term is defined negatively and does not imply a linguistic relationship. Joseph Greenberg proposed an Indo-Pacific languages superfamily containing Andamanese languages, Papuan languages and Tasmanian languages but not Australian Aboriginal languages.

The majority of the Papuan languages are spoken on the island of New Guinea (which is divided between the country of Papua New Guinea and Indonesian province of West Papua), with a few spoken in the Bismark archipelago, Bougainville Island, and the Solomon Islands to the east, and a number in Halmahera, Timor, and the Alor archipelago to the west. One Papuan language is spoken in Australia, in the eastern Torres Straits.

Although there has been relatively little study of the Papuan languages, compared with, say, Australian or Austronesian languages, a number of tentative large-scale genetic groups have been identified by linguists. In the field of Papuan linguistics these are referred to as phyla. The largest phylum posited for the Papuan region is the Trans-New Guinea phylum, consisting of a large number of languages running mainly along the highlands of New Guinea.

One commonly-used classification system for Papuan language phyla is listed below, with the approximate number of languages in each phylum in parentheses. The list incudes isolate languages, for which no genetic affiliation is known. This scheme is that used by the Ethnologue, based on very preliminary work of linguist Stephen Würm and others. Other linguists, including William A. Foley, have identified over sixty language families, and suggest that many of these phyla are based on areal features and structural similarities. Indeed, Würm himself has said that he does not expect his classification to stand up to scrutiny. One problem is that many of the phyla have no basic shared vocabulary to compare, with the possible exception of pronouns. (See East Papuan languages.) A second problem is that several Papuan languages are known to have borrowed pronouns, as is common in neighboring Southeast Asia. For example, one language may have pronoun A for "me" and pronoun B for "you (feminine)", while a neighboring but unrelated language has B for "me" and A for "you". Thus pronouns alone are not sufficient evidence for classification in Papuan linguistics.

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.

Phyla proposed by Würm (with approximate number of languages)

Two of Würm's isolates have since been linked is the

and since Würm's time two languages belonging a new family has been discovered, the

The Oksapmin language, originally placed by Würm as an isolate within Trans-New Guinea, has been proposed to instead be related to the Left May family, or to form a separate family with the Karkar isolate.

There are also many Austronesian languages spoken along the coasts of New Guinea.

Several languages of Flores and nearby islands, and especially the language of Savu Island (also called Savu) are usually thought to be Austronesian, but are reported to have large numbers of non-Austronesian words in their basic vocabulary. It has been suggested that these may originally have been non-Austronesian languages that have since borrowed nearly all of their vocabulary from neighboring Austronesian languages, but no connection with the Papuan languages of Timor or Halmahera has been found.

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