The East Geelvink Bay or East Cenderawasih languages are a

language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in h ...

of a dozen

Papuan languages The 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. It is a strictly geogr ...

along the eastern coast of Geelvink Bay in Indonesian Papua, which is also known as Sarera Bay or Cenderawasih.

Languages

The East Geelvink Bay languages are: * Turunggare, Burate * Barapasi * Bauzi– Demisa, Nisa-Anasi (Bapu) *Central ** Sirami River: Kofei– Sauri, Tefaro ** Woria Of these, only Turunggare, Barapasi, and Bauzi are known well enough to demonstrate a relationship, though they are all lexically similar (> 60%). The unclassified Kehu language, spoken between Turunggare and Burate, may turn out to be East Geelvink Bay as wel

Bauzi is the best documented East Geelvink Bay language, but may or may not be representative of the Geelvink Bay family as a whole.

Classification

A relationship between Yawa languages, Yawa, spoken on

Yapen Yapen (also Japan, Jobi) is an island of Papua, Indonesia. The Yapen Strait separates Yapen and the Biak Islands to the north. It is in Cenderawasih Bay off the north-western coast of the island of New Guinea. To the west is Mios Num Island ...

Island, and the East Geelvink Bay languages was tentatively proposed by C. L. Voorhoeve in 1975 in a proposal he called Geelvink Bay. The hypothesis was taken up by Stephen Wurm, who developed it as part of an initial attempt to classify the

; however, the relationship would be a distant one, and later linguists such as Mark Donohue considered Yawa to be a language isolate. Clouse (1997) removed the Lakes Plain languages of the upper

Mamberamo River The Mamberamo (''Indonesian: Sungai Mamberamo'') is the second longest river on the island of New Guinea, after Sepik River (1,146 km) and third largest in Oceania by discharge (5,500 m3/s) volume after Fly River (7,500 m3/s) and Sepik (7,000 m3/ ...

in the interior of Papua from Trans–New Guinea, where Würm had placed them, and by comparison with Bauzi and Demisa proposes them to be a sister family of the East Geelvink Bay languages. Basic vocabulary cognates that Clouse suggests to connect the two stocks include: However, in his 2005 classification based on comparative evidence from pronouns, Malcolm Ross treats all three groups as separate families, with Yawa tentatively placed in an extended West Papuan family.

Typology

Verbal morphology in the East Geelvink Bay family is less complex than that of Tor-Kwerba languages, but is more complex than that of the Lakes Plain languages.

Pronouns

The pronouns Ross reconstructs for proto–East Geelvink Bay are, :

Basic vocabulary

Basic vocabulary of selected East Cenderawasih languages ( Barapasi, Bauzi, Demisa, Tunggare) listed in Foley (2018): : The following basic vocabulary words are from Clouse (1997) and Voorhoeve (1975), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database: :

References

External links

East Geelvink Bay languages database at TransNewGuinea.org
{{Language families Languages of western New Guinea Cenderawasih Bay Language families Papuan languages