Papuan languages

Speaker numbers

Most Papuan languages are spoken by hundreds to thousands of people; the most populous are found in the New Guinea Highlands, where a few exceed a hundred thousand. These include Western Dani (180,000 in 1993) and Ekari (100,000 reported 1985) in the western (Indonesian) highlands, and Enga (230,000 in 2000), Huli (150,000 reported 2011), and Melpa (130,000 reported 1991) in the eastern (PNG) highlands. To the west of New Guinea, the largest languages are Makasae in East Timor (100,000 in 2010) and Galela in Halmahera (80,000 reported 1990). To the east, Terei (27,000 reported 2003) and Naasioi (20,000 reported 2007) are spoken on Bougainville.

History of classification

Although there has been relatively little study of these languages compared with the Austronesian family, there have been three preliminary attempts at large-scale genealogical classification, by Joseph Greenberg, Stephen Wurm, and Malcolm Ross. 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. The various high-level families may represent distinct migrations into New Guinea, presumably from the west. 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.

Statistical analyses designed to pick up signals too faint to be detected by the comparative method, though of disputed validity, suggest five major Papuan stocks (roughly Trans–New Guinea, West, North, East, and South Papuan languages); long-range comparison has also suggested connections between selected languages, but again the methodology is not orthodox in historical linguistics.

The Great Andamanese languages may be related to some western Papuan languages, but are not themselves covered by the term Papuan.

Wurm (1975)

The most widely used classification of Papuan languages is that of Stephen Wurm, listed below with the approximate number of languages in each family in parentheses. This was the scheme used by Ethnologue prior to Ross's classification (below). It is based on very preliminary work, much of it typological, and Wurm himself has stated that he does not expect it to hold up well to scrutiny. Other linguists, including William A. Foley, have suggested that many of Wurm's phyla are based on areal features and structural similarities, and accept only the lowest levels of his classification, most of which he inherited from prior taxonomies. Foley (1986) divides Papuan languages into over sixty small language families, plus a number of isolates. However, more recently Foley has accepted the broad outline if not the details of Wurm's classification, as he and Ross have substantiated a large portion of Wurm's Trans–New Guinea phylum.

According to Ross (see below), the main problem with Wurm's classification is that he did not take contact-induced change into account. For example, several of the main branches of his Trans–New Guinea phylum have no vocabulary in common with other Trans–New Guinea languages, and were classified as Trans–New Guinea because they are similar grammatically. However, there are also many Austronesian languages that are grammatically similar to Trans–New Guinea languages due to the influence of contact and bilingualism. Similarly, several groups that do have substantial basic vocabulary in common with Trans–New Guinea 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 (perhaps including the Sepik–Ramu 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.

Foley (2003)

Foley summarized the state of the literature. Besides Trans–New Guinea and families possibly belonging in TNG (see), he accepted the proposals for,

Ross (2005)

Malcolm Ross re-evaluated Wurm's proposal on purely lexical grounds. That is, he looked at shared vocabulary, and especially shared idiosyncrasies analogous to English I and me vs. German ich and mich. The poor state of documentation of Papuan languages restricts this approach largely to pronouns. Nonetheless, Ross believes that he has been able to validate much of Wurm's classification, albeit with revisions to correct for Wurm's partially typological approach. (See Trans–New Guinea languages.) Ethnologue (2009) largely follows Ross.

It has been suggested that the families that appear when comparing pronouns may be due to pronoun borrowing rather than to genealogical relatedness. 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. Also, he shows that the two cases of alleged pronoun borrowing in New Guinea are simple coincidence, explainable as regular developments from the protolanguages of the families in question: as earlier forms of the languages are reconstructed, their pronouns become less similar, not more. (Ross argues that open-class pronoun systems, where borrowings are common, are found in hierarchical cultures such as those of Southeast Asia and Japan, where pronouns indicate details of relationship and social status rather than simply being grammatical pro-forms as they are in the more egalitarian New Guinea societies.)

Ross has proposed 23 Papuan language families and 9–13 isolates. However, because of his more stringent criteria, he was not able to find enough data to classify all Papuan languages, especially many isolates that have no close relatives to aid in their classification.

Ross also found that the Lower Mamberamo languages (or at least the Warembori language—he had insufficient data on Pauwi) are Austronesian languages that have been heavily transformed by contact with Papuan languages, much as the Takia language has. 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.

Note that while this classification may be more reliable than past attempts, it is based on a single parameter, pronouns, and therefore must remain tentative. Although pronouns are conservative elements in a language, they are short and utilise a reduced set of the language's phonemic inventory. Both phenomena greatly increase the possibility of chance resemblances, especially when they are not confirmed by lexical similarities.

Wichmann (2013)

Søren Wichmann (2013) accepts the following 109 groups as coherent Papuan families, based on computational analyses performed by the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) combined with Harald Hammarström's (2012) classification. Some of the groups could turn out to be related to each other, but Wichmann (2013) lists them as separate groups pending further research.

9 families have been broken up into separate groups in Wichmann's (2013) classification, which are:

• Biksi (2 groups)
• Dibiyaso-Doso-Turumsa (2 groups)
• Kwalean (2 groups)
• Lower Sepik-Ramu (5 groups)
• Morehead-Wasur (2 groups)
• Nuclear Trans-New Guinea (16 groups)
• Pauwasi (2 groups: Western and Eastern)
• Sentanic (2 groups)
• Sko (2 groups)

An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller, Velupillai, Wichmann et al. (2013) found lexical similarities among the following language groups. Note that some of these automatically generated groupings are due to chance resemblances.

Palmer (2018)

Bill Palmer et al. (2018) propose 43 independent families and 37 language isolates in the Papuasphere, comprising a total of 862 languages. A total of 80 independent groups are recognized. While Pawley & Hammarström's internal classification of Trans-New Guinea largely resembles a composite of Usher's and Ross' classifications, Palmer et al. do not address the more tentative families that Usher proposes, such as Northwest New Guinea.

The coherence of the South Bird's Head, East Bird's Head, Pauwasi, Kwomtari, and Central Solomons families are uncertain, and hence are marked below as "tentative."

Glottolog 4.0 (2019)

Glottolog 4.0 (2019), based partly on Usher, recognizes 70 independent families and 55 isolates.

Usher & Suter (2024)

The following families are identified by Timothy Usher and Edgar Suter in their NewGuineaWorld project:

In addition, poorly attested Karami remains unclassified. Extinct Tambora and the East Papuan languages have not been addressed, except to identify Yele as an Austronesian language.

Greenberg's classification

Joseph Greenberg proposed an Indo-Pacific phylum containing the (Northern) Andamanese languages, all Papuan languages, and the Tasmanian languages, but not the Australian Aboriginal languages. Very few linguists accept his grouping. It is distinct from the Trans–New Guinea phylum of the classifications below.

External relations

Joseph Greenberg proposed that the Andamanese languages (or at least the Great Andamanese languages) off the coast of Burma are related to the Papuan or West Papuan languages. Stephen Wurm stated that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and Timor–Alor families "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity [...] in a number of instances". However, he considered this not evidence of a connection between (Great) Andamanese and Trans–New Guinea, but of a substratum from an earlier migration to New Guinea from the west.

Greenberg also suggested a connection to the Tasmanian languages. However, the Tasmanian peoples were isolated for perhaps 10,000 years, their disappearance wiped out their languages before much was recorded of them, and few linguists expect that they will ever be linked to another language family.

William A. Foley (1986) noted lexical similarities between R. M. W. Dixon's 1980 reconstruction of proto-Australian and the languages of the East New Guinea Highlands. He believed that it was naïve 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. However, Dixon later abandoned his proto-Australian proposal, and Foley's ideas need to be re-evaluated in light of recent research. Wurm also suggested the Sepik–Ramu languages have similarities with the Australian languages, but believed this may be due to a substratum effect, but nevertheless believed that the Australian languages represent a linguistic group that existed in New Guinea before the arrival of the Papuan languages (which he believed arrived in at least two different groups).

Typology

The West Papuan, Lower Mamberamo, and most Torricelli languages are all left-headed, as well as the languages of New Britain and New Ireland. These languages all have SVO word order, with the exception of the language isolate Kuot, which has VSO word order. All other Papuan languages are right-headed.

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