The Walio languages are a small

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 ...

of clearly related languages, : Walio,

Pei PEI or Pei may refer to: Places *Matecaña International Airport, Pereira, Colombia, IATA code PEI *Pei County (沛县), Jiangsu, China *Pei Commandery (沛郡), a commandery in Chinese history *Prince Edward Island, a province of Canada * Pei, ...

, Yawiyo, and Tuwari. However, they are not close: Walio and Yawiyo have only a 12% lexical similarity. They are frequently classified among the

Sepik languages The Sepik or Sepik River languages are a family of some 50 Papuan languages spoken in the Sepik river basin of northern Papua New Guinea, proposed by Donald Laycock in 1965 in a somewhat more limited form than presented here. They tend to have ...

of northern

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; , ; tpi, Papua Niugini; ho, Papua Niu Gini), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea ( tpi, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; ho, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), is a country i ...

, though ''

Glottolog ''Glottolog'' is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute for ...

'' leaves them out. ''

'' 3.4 classifies the Walio languages as an independent language family.

References

* {{Sepik languages Leonhard Schultze languages