West Bird's Head languages are a small family of poorly documented
Papuan languages spoken on the
Bird's Head Peninsula of New Guinea.
The West Bird's Head (WBH) family is a well-defined family of six languages spoken at the western end of the
Bird's Head Peninsula of New Guinea and the eastern part of the island of
Salawati opposite the Bird's Head's western shore. Based on pronominal evidence, they are perhaps related to the
North Halmahera languages
The North Halmahera languages are a family of languages spoken in the northern and eastern parts of the island of Halmahera and some neighboring islands in Indonesia. The southwestern part of the island is occupied by the unrelated South Halmaher ...
of
North Maluku.
Language contact
West Bird's Head languages have been heavily influenced by
Austronesian languages. Austronesian influence is evident in
SVO word order (as opposed to
SOV word order in most other
Papuan language families), pronouns, numerals, and other typological features.
Languages
* Seget–Moi (
Sele Strait
Sele may refer to:
Places Africa
* Sele, Burkina Faso, a village in the Ouéleni Department of Burkina Fase.
* Sele, Ethiopia, a town in Agbe municipality
Asia
* Sele, Turkey, a Turkish village in Kailar in Ottoman times
* Şələ, Azerbaijan
...
):
**
Seget
**
Moi Moi or MOI may refer to:
People
* Moi (name), a list of people with the given name or surname
* Moisés Delgado (born 1994), Spanish footballer commonly known as simply Moi
* Moisés Rodríguez (born 1997), Spanish footballer commonly known as s ...
* South West Bird's Head (
Seremuk River):
**
Tehit (or Kaibus; the most populous, with 10,000 speakers)
**
Kalabra (close to Tehit)
**
Moraid
* ?
Kuwani
Kuwani is attested only from a single word list, but is clearly distinct.
Vocabulary comparison
The following basic vocabulary words are from Voorhoeve (1975), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database:
:
References
{{Papuan languages
Languages of western New Guinea
West and Central Bird's Head languages