The Huon 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 ...
, spoken on the
Huon Peninsula
Huon Peninsula is a large rugged peninsula on the island of New Guinea in Morobe Province, eastern Papua New Guinea. It is named after French explorer Jean-Michel Huon de Kermadec. The peninsula is dominated by the steep Saruwaged and Finisterr ...
of Papua New Guinea, that was classified within the original
Trans–New Guinea (TNG) proposal, and
William A. Foley considers their TNG identity to be established. They share with the
Finisterre languages
The Finisterre languages are a language family, spoken in the Finisterre Range of Papua New Guinea, classified within the original Trans–New Guinea (TNG) proposal, and William A. Foley considers their TNG identity to be established. They ...
a small closed class of verbs taking pronominal object prefixes some of which are cognate across both families (Suter 2012), strong morphological evidence that they are related.
Internal structure
Huon and Finisterre, and then the connection between them, were identified by
Kenneth McElhanon (1967, 1970). They are clearly valid language families. Huon contains two clear branches, Eastern and Western. The Western languages allow more consonants in syllable-final position (p, t, k, m, n, ŋ), while the Eastern languages have neutralized those distinctions to two, the glottal stop (written ''c'') and the velar nasal (McElhanon 1974: 17). Beyond that, classification is based on
lexicostatistics
Lexicostatistics is a method of comparative linguistics that involves comparing the percentage of lexical cognates between languages to determine their relationship. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative method but does not reconstruct a ...
, which provides less precise classification results.
* Huon family
** Eastern Huon branch
***Huon Tip
****Southeast Huon:
Kâte,
Mape
****
Sene
****
Masaweng River:
Migabac,
Momare
***
Kovai
***
Tobo-Kube
***
Dedua
** Western Huon branch
***
Burum (Mindik),
Borong (Kosorong)
***
Kinalakna,
Kumokio
***
Mese,
Nabak
***
Komba,
Selepet–
Timbe
***
Nomu
***
Ono
***
Sialum
Kâte is the local
lingua franca.
References
*
* McElhanon, K. A. (1970). Lexicostatistics and the classification of Huon Peninsula languages. ''Oceania'' 40: 215-231.
* McElhanon, K. A. (1974). The glottal stop in Kâte. ''Kivung'' 7: 16-22.
* Suter, Edgar (2012). Verbs with pronominal object prefixes in Finisterre-Huon languages. In: Harald Hammarström and Wilco van den Heuvel (eds.). ''History, contact and classification of Papuan languages.''
pecial Issue 2012 of Language and Linguistics in Melanesia 23-58. Port Moresby: Linguistic Society of Papua New Guinea.
{{Trans–New Guinea languages
Languages of Papua New Guinea