The Wogamus languages are a pair of closely related languages, : Wogamusin and Chenapian. They are 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 ...

; Malcolm Ross and William A. Foley (2018) place them in the Upper Sepik branch of that family. The Wogamus languages are spoken along the banks of the Wogamush River and

Sepik The Sepik () is the longest river on the island of New Guinea, and the second largest in Oceania by discharge volume after the Fly River. The majority of the river flows through the Papua New Guinea (PNG) provinces of Sandaun (formerly West Se ...

River in western

East Sepik Province East Sepik is a province in Papua New Guinea. Its capital is Wewak. East Sepik has an estimated population of 433,481 people (2010 census) and is 43,426 km square in size. History Cherubim Dambui was appointed as East Sepik's first premier b ...

, just to the east of the

Iwam languages The Iwam languages are a small family of two clearly related languages, : May River Iwam and Sepik Iwam. They are generally classified among the Sepik languages of northern Papua New Guinea; Malcolm Ross places them in an Upper Sepik branch of ...

Noun classes

Wogamus languages have

noun class In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some a ...

es reminiscent of those found in Bantu languages. Noun classes in Wogamusin and Chenapian are listed below, with Wogamusin -''um'' ‘three’ and Chenapian -''mu'' ‘three’ used as examples. :

Vocabulary comparison

The following basic vocabulary words are from the Trans-New Guinea database. The Wogamusin data is from Foley (2005) and Laycock (1968), Laycock, Donald C. 1968. Languages of the Lumi Subdistrict (West Sepik District), New Guinea. ''

Oceanic Linguistics ''Oceanic Linguistics'' is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on the indigenous languages of the Oceanic area and parts of Southeast Asia, including the indigenous Australian languages, the Papuan languages of New Guinea, ...

'', 7 (1): 36-66. and the Chenapian data is from SIL field notes (1983). :

Footnotes

References

* {{Sepik languages Upper Sepik languages