Papuan Languages
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Papuan Languages
The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands in Indonesia, Solomon Islands, and East Timor. It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply a genetic relationship. New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse region in the world. Besides the Austronesian languages, there arguably are some 800 languages divided into perhaps sixty small language families, with unclear relationships to each other or to any other languages, plus many language isolates. The majority of the Papuan languages are spoken on the island of New Guinea, with a number spoken in the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville Island and the Solomon Islands to the east, and in Halmahera, Timor and the Alor archipelago to the west. The westernmost language, Tambora in Sumbawa, is extinct. One Papuan language, Meriam, is spoken within the national borders of Australia, in the eastern Torres Strait. Several ...
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Indonesia
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guinea, Indonesia is the world's largest archipelagic state and the List of countries and dependencies by area, 14th-largest country by area, at . With over 280 million people, Indonesia is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, fourth-most-populous country and the most populous Islam by country, Muslim-majority country. Java, the world's List of islands by population, most populous island, is home to more than half of the country's population. Indonesia operates as a Presidential system, presidential republic with an elected People's Consultative Assembly, legislature and consists of Provinces of Indonesia, 38 provinces, nine of which have Autonomous administrative divisi ...
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Meriam Language
Meriam (; also ''Miriam, Meryam, Mer, Mir, Miriam-Mir'', etc. and ''Eastern, Isten, Esten'' and ''Able Able'') or the Eastern Torres Strait language is the language of the people of the small islands of ''Mer'' ( Murray Island), ''Waier'' and ''Dauar'', ''Erub'' ( Darnley Island), and ''Ugar'' ( Stephens Island) in the eastern Torres Strait, Queensland, Australia. In the Western Torres Strait language, Kalaw Lagaw Ya, it is called ''Mœyam'' or ''Mœyamau Ya''. It is the only Papuan language in Australian territory. Classification Meriam was classified in the Eastern Trans-Fly family of the Trans–New Guinea Phylum by Stephen Wurm, who however felt that these have retained remnants of pre-Trans–New Guinea languages; this is followed by Ethnologue (2005). In 2005 Malcolm Ross concluded that the Eastern Trans-Fly languages were not part of the Trans–New Guinea phylum. R. M. W. Dixon (2002) regards claims of a relationship between the Fly River languages and Meriam as u ...
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Huli Language
Huli is a Tari language spoken by the Huli people of the Hela Province of Papua New Guinea. It has a pentadecimal (base-15) numeral system: means 15, means 15×2 = 30, and means 15×15 = 225. Huli has a pandanus language called (bush divide taboo) used for collecting karuka nuts () as well as hunting or traveling. is used to evade malevolent bush spirits. The grammar for is nearly identical to normal Huli, but the vocabulary is changed, often borrowing words from Duna but with changed meanings. Phonology Huli has a syllable structure of (C)V. Vowels /ɑ/ is pronounced more fronted as �before /r/ and /ʝ/. Vowel nasality is phonemic A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ... in the language. Vowels can also carry three phonemic tones; high-falling, mi ...
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Enga Language
Enga is a language of the East New Guinea Highlands spoken by a quarter-million people in Enga Province, Papua New Guinea. It has the largest number of speakers of any Trans–New Guinea language, as well as any native language in New Guinea, and is second overall after Papuan Malay. An Enga-based pidgin is used by speakers of Arafundi languages. Population There are currently over 150,000 Enga people occupying the mountainous region ranging from Mount Hagen and westward to Porgera. Enga people are traditionally sedentary gardeners who grow sweet potatoes as their staple crop, and who keep pigs and fowls. Coffee and pyrethrum are also grown as cash crops in Enga culture. Pigs, pearls, shells, axes, and plumes are items of wealth and signify social occasions when exchanged or circulated. Enga clans have boundaries defining their homesteads across the territory and have been known to fight with each other over land, marriage exchanges, or vengeance. Men and women tradit ...
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Ekari Language
Ekari (also ''Ekagi'', ''Kapauku'', ''Mee'') is a Trans–New Guinea language spoken by about 100,000 people in the Paniai lakes region of the Indonesian province of Central Papua, including the villages of Enarotali, Mapia and Moanemani. This makes it the second-most populous Papuan language in Indonesian New Guinea after Western Dani. Language use is vigorous. Documentation is quite limited. Phonology Consonants The voiced velar stop is pronounced with lateral release. Doble describes both /k/ and /ɡᶫ/ as being labialized after the back vowels (i.e., , ), with having 'varying' degrees of the lateral. Staroverov & Tebay describe as being velar lateral before front vowels and uvular non-lateral before non-front vowels. When lateral, there is usually a stop onset, but occasionally just is heard. is a "more palatalized " (perhaps or ) before the high front vowel (e.g., ). Vowels Both Doble (1987) and Staroverov & Tebay (2019) describe five vowel qua ...
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Western Dani Language
Western Dani, or Lani, is a Nuclear-Trans-New Guinea language. It is the Papuan language with the most speakers in Indonesian New Guinea. It is spoken by the Lani people in the province of Highland Papua. The Baliem Valley tribes are called ''Oeringoep'' and ''Timorini'' in literature from the 1920s, but those names are no longer used. Phonology Consonants The consonant phoneme inventory of Western Dani has been described as follows: At the beginning of words, oral stops have aspirated allophones In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosi ... ʰ, tʰ, kʰ, kʷʰ intervocalically, voiceless /p t k / have voiced allophones � d ~ ɾ ɣ ~ ʁ for instance following the prefix no-/na- meaning "my". An intervocalic /ɣ/ is pronounced as , and a /ɹ/ before a high vowe ...
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New Guinea Highlands
The New Guinea Highlands, also known as the Central Range or Central Cordillera, is a long chain of mountain ranges on the island of New Guinea, including the island's highest peak, Puncak Jaya, Indonesia, , the highest mountain in Oceania. The range is home to many intermountain river valleys, many of which support thriving agricultural communities. The highlands run generally east-west the length of the island, which is divided politically between Indonesia in the west and Papua New Guinea in the east. These mountains stretch from the Weyland Mountains starting in Wondama Bay Regency in the west to the Milne Bay Province in the east. Geography The Central Cordillera, some peaks of which are capped with ice, consists of (from east to west): the Central Highlands and Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea including the Owen Stanley Range in the southeast, whose highest peak is Mount Victoria at 4,038 metres (13,248 feet), the Albert Victor Mountains, the Sir Arthur Gordon Rang ...
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William A
William is a masculine given name of Germanic origin. It became popular in England after the Norman conquest in 1066,All Things William"Meaning & Origin of the Name"/ref> and remained so throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern era. It is sometimes abbreviated "Wm." Shortened familiar versions in English include Will or Wil, Wills, Willy, Willie, Bill, Billie, and Billy. A common Irish form is Liam. Scottish diminutives include Wull, Willie or Wullie (as in Oor Wullie). Female forms include Willa, Willemina, Wilma and Wilhelmina. Etymology William is related to the German given name ''Wilhelm''. Both ultimately descend from Proto-Germanic ''*Wiljahelmaz'', with a direct cognate also in the Old Norse name ''Vilhjalmr'' and a West Germanic borrowing into Medieval Latin ''Willelmus''. The Proto-Germanic name is a compound of *''wiljô'' "will, wish, desire" and *''helmaz'' "helm, helmet".Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxfor ...
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Sidney Herbert Ray
Sidney Herbert Ray (28 May 1858 – 1 January 1939) was a British comparative and descriptive linguist who specialised in Melanesian languages.Papers and field notes relating to his linguistic work are held bSOAS Special Collections/ref> Biography In 1892, he read an important paper, ''The Languages of British New Guinea'', to the Ninth International Congress of Orientalists. In that paper, he established the distinction between the Austronesian and Papuan languages of New Guinea New Guinea (; Hiri Motu: ''Niu Gini''; , fossilized , also known as Papua or historically ) is the List of islands by area, world's second-largest island, with an area of . Located in Melanesia in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is .... Ray (1892). Although he never held an academic position, and was employed throughout his working life as a school teacher, S. H. Ray was an energetic fieldworker, and participated in a number of expeditions. His first fieldwork was carried out as ...
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Melanesians
Melanesians are the predominant and Indigenous peoples of Oceania, indigenous inhabitants of Melanesia, in an area stretching from New Guinea to the Fiji Islands. Most speak one of the many languages of the Austronesian languages, Austronesian language family (especially ones in the Oceanic languages, Oceanic branch) or one of the many unrelated families of Papuan languages. There are several creoles of the region, such as Tok Pisin, Hiri Motu, Pijin language, Solomon Islands Pijin, Bislama, and Papuan Malay. Origin and genetics The origin of Melanesians is generally associated with the first settlement of Australasia by a lineage dubbed 'Australasians' or 'Australo-Papuans' during the Initial Upper Paleolithic, which is "ascribed to a population movement with uniform genetic features and material culture" (Ancient East Eurasians), and sharing deep ancestry with modern East Asian people, East Asian peoples and other Asia-Pacific groups. It is estimated that people reached Austral ...
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Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian Languages
The Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (CEMP) languages form a proposed branch of the Malayo-Polynesian languages consisting of over 700 languages (Blust 1993). Distribution The Central Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken in the Lesser Sunda and Maluku Islands of the Banda Sea, in an area corresponding closely to the Indonesian provinces of East Nusa Tenggara and Maluku and the nation of East Timor (excepting the Papuan languages The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands in Indonesia, Solomon Islands, and East Timor. It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply ... of Timor and nearby islands), but with the Bima language extending to the eastern half of Sumbawa Island in the province of West Nusa Tenggara and the Sula languages of the Sula Islands in the southwest corner of the province of North Maluku. The principal islands in this region are Sumbaw ...
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Sumba Languages
The Sumba languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian language family, spoken on Sumba, an island in eastern Indonesia.Asplund, Leif (2010)''The Languages of Sumba.''Paper presented at the East Nusantara Conference in Kupang. They are closely related to the Hawu-Dhao languages. Classification A preliminary internal classification by Asplund (2010) recognizes three branches of the Sumba languages: *Sumba **Central–East Sumbanese ***East Sumbanese: Kambera (dialect cluster) *** Mamboru ***Central Sumbanese **** Anakalangu **** Wanukaka **** Baliledu-Buawa **Wejewa–Lamboya *** Wejewa *** Lamboya **Kodi–Garo ***Kodi ***Garo References Further reading * External links Sumbaat ''Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' 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 comprehensive catalogue of languages. It w ...'' (22nd ed., 2019). ...
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