The East Papuan languages is a defunct proposal for a

family Family (from la, familia) is a Social group, group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or Affinity (law), affinity (by marriage or other relationship). The purpose of the family is to maintain the well-being of its ...

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 geogra ...

spoken on the islands to the east of

New Guinea New Guinea (; Hiri Motu Hiri Motu, also known as Police Motu, Pidgin Motu, or just Hiri, is a language of Papua New Guinea, which is spoken in surrounding areas of Port Moresby (Capital of Papua New Guinea). It is a simplified version of ...

, including

New Britain New Britain ( tpi, Niu Briten) is the largest island in the Bismarck Archipelago, part of the Islands Region of Papua New Guinea. It is separated from New Guinea by a northwest corner of the Solomon Sea (or with an island hop of Umboi the Dam ...

, New Ireland, Bougainville,

Solomon Islands Solomon Islands is an island country consisting of six major islands and over 900 smaller islands in Oceania, to the east of Papua New Guinea and north-west of Vanuatu. It has a land area of , and a population of approx. 700,000. Its capita ...

, and the

Santa Cruz Islands The Santa Cruz Islands are a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean, part of Temotu Province of the nation of Solomon Islands discovered by the Spaniards. They lie approximately 250 miles (400 km) to the southeast of the Solomon Islands ...

. There is no evidence that these languages are related to each other, and the Santa Cruz languages are no longer recognized as Papuan. All but two of the starred languages below ( Yélî Dnye and Sulka) make a gender distinction in their pronouns. Several of the heavily Papuanized Austronesian languages of New Britain do as well. This suggests a pre-Austronesian

language area A sprachbund (, lit. "language federation"), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. The lang ...

in the region.

History of the proposal

The East Papuan languages were proposed as a family by linguist

Stephen Wurm Stephen Adolphe Wurm ( hu, Wurm István Adolf, ; 19 August 1922 – 24 October 2001) was a Hungarian-born Australian linguist. Early life Wurm was born in Budapest, the second child to the German-speaking Adolphe Wurm and the Hungarian-sp ...

(1975) and others. However, their work was preliminary, and there is little evidence that the East Papuan languages actually have a genetic relationship. For example, none of these fifteen languages marked with asterisks below share more than 2–3% of their basic vocabulary with any of the others. Dunn and colleagues (2005) tested the reliability of the proposed 2–3%

cognate In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymology, etymological ancestor in a proto-language, common parent language. Because language c ...

s by randomizing the vocabulary lists and comparing them again. The nonsense comparisons produced the same 2–3% of "shared" vocabulary, demonstrating that the proposed cognates of the East Papuan languages, and even of proposed families within the East Papuan languages, are as likely to be due to chance as to any genealogical relationship. Thus in a conservative classification, many of the East Papuan languages would be considered

language isolate Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The num ...

s. Since the islands in question have been settled for at least 35 000 years, their considerable linguistic diversity is unsurprising. However, Malcolm Ross (2001; 2005) has presented evidence from comparing

pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not co ...

s from nineteen of these languages that several of the lower-level branches of East Papuan may indeed be valid families. This is the classification adopted here. For Wurm's more inclusive classification, see the

Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensiv ...

entr
here

Classification (Ross 2005)

Small families

Each of the first five entries in boldface is an independent language family, not known to be related to the others. Languages that are transparently related to each other are listed together on the same line. The first family is a more tentative proposal than the others and awaits confirmation. Reconstructed pronoun sets for each of the families are given in the individual articles. *? Yele – West New Britain family entative *

East New Britain East New Britain is a province of Papua New Guinea, consisting of the north-eastern part of the island of New Britain and the Duke of York Islands. The capital of the province is Kokopo, not far from the old capital of Rabaul, which was largely des ...

family * North Bougainville family (Bougainville) * South Bougainville family (Bougainville) * Central Solomon family * Dunn and colleagues found no demonstrable shared vocabulary between these fifteen languages. ** Ross considered these four languages in addition to the fifteen studied by Dunn and colleagues.

True language isolates

These three languages are not thought to be demonstrably related to each other or to any language in the world. * Sulka isolate* – New Britain (poor data quality; the possibility remains that Sulka will be shown to be related to Kol or Baining) * Kol isolate* – New Britain * Kuot (Panaras) isolate* – New Ireland ''* Dunn and colleagues found no demonstrable shared vocabulary between these fifteen languages.''

Austronesian languages formerly classified as East Papuan

Wurm classified the three languages of the Santa Cruz and

Reef Islands The Reef Islands are a loose collection of 16 islands in the northwestern part of the Solomon Islands province of Temotu. These islands have historically also been known by the names of Swallow Islands and Matema Islands. Geography The islan ...

as an additional family within East Papuan. However, new data on these languages, along with advances in the reconstruction of

Proto-Oceanic Proto-Oceanic (abbr. ''POc'') is a proto-language that historical linguists since Otto Dempwolff have reconstructed as the hypothetical common ancestor of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family. Proto-Oceanic is a descendant ...

, has made it clear that they are in fact Austronesian: *

Reefs – Santa Cruz languages The Reef Islands – Santa Cruz languages (usually shortened to Reefs – Santa Cruz, abbreviated RSC) are a branch of the Oceanic languages comprising the languages of the Santa Cruz Islands and Reef Islands: * Äiwoo (also known as ''Reefs'') ...

: Santa Cruz, Nanggu, Äiwoo Similarly, Wurm had classified the extinct

Kazukuru language Kazukuru is an extinct language that was once spoken in New Georgia, Solomon Islands. The Dororo and Guliguli languages (if they even existed) were transcriptional variants, dialects, or closely related. The speakers of Kazukuru gradually merged ...

and its possible sister languages of

New Georgia New Georgia, with an area of , is the largest of the islands in Western Province, Solomon Islands, and the 200th-largest island in the world. Geography New Georgia island is located in the New Georgia Group, an archipelago including most of ...

as a sixth branch of East Papuan. However, in a joint 2007 paper, Dunn and Ross argued that this was also Austronesian. * Kazukuru family:

Lexical comparison

The tables below give lexical comparisons for the East Papuan languages (i.e., all Papuan languages spoken in

and islands to the east), with languages listed roughly from west to east. All lexical items are from the Trans-New Guinea database unless noted otherwise.

References

* * * * * * {{Papuan languages Languages of Papua New Guinea Languages of the Solomon Islands Proposed language families Papuan languages