The Kwalean or Humene–Uare languages are a small family of Trans–New Guinea languages spoken in the "

Bird's Tail The Papuan Peninsula, also known as the Bird's Tail Peninsula, is a large peninsula in Papua New Guinea, southeast of the city of Lae, that makes up the southeastern portion of the island of New Guinea. The peninsula is the easternmost extent of ...

" (southeastern peninsula) of New Guinea. They are classified within the Southeast Papuan branch of Trans–New Guinea. The Kwalean languages are spoken in Rigo District, Central Province,

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...

Languages

The languages are Humene, Uare (Kwale) and recently extinct Mulaha. It is not clear if Mulaha was an outlier, or as close to the others as they are to each other.

Classification

Humene and Uare are quite close (70% basic vocabulary), Mulaha more distant (22% with Uare). The Kwalean family is not accepted by

Søren Wichmann Søren Wichmann (born 1964) is a Danish linguist specializing in historical linguistics, linguistic typology, Mesoamerican languages, and epigraphy. Since June 2016, he has been employed as a University Lecturer at Leiden University Centre for L ...

(2013), who splits it into two separate groups, namely Humene– Uare and Mulaha.Wichmann, Søren. 2013
A classification of Papuan languages
. In: Hammarström, Harald and Wilco van den Heuvel (eds.), History, contact and classification of Papuan languages (Language and Linguistics in Melanesia, Special Issue 2012), 313-386. Port Moresby: Linguistic Society of Papua New Guinea.

Proto-language

Phonemes

Usher (2020) reconstructs the consonant inventory of Humene and Uare as follows:New Guinea World, Humene–Uare
/ref> : The *k is rare. Vowels are *i *e *ɛ *a *ɔ *o *u.

Pronouns

Usher (2020) reconstructs the pronouns of Humene–Uare as: :

Basic vocabulary

Some lexical reconstructions by Usher (2020) are: :

Vocabulary comparison

The following basic vocabulary words are from Dutton (1970) (with additional data for Uare from 1988 SIL field notes), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database. Proto-Kwalean reconstructions are from Ross (2014). Note that the words cited constitute translation equivalents, whether they are cognate (e.g. ''nuune'', ''nune'' for “breast”) or not (e.g. ''hadi'', ''aroba'' for “stone”). :

Evolution

Kwale reflexes of proto-Trans-New Guinea (pTNG) etyma are: *''maɣa'' ‘egg’ < *maŋgV *''oda'' ‘leg’ < *k(a,o)ndok *''nomone'' ‘louse’ < *niman *''ire'' ‘tree’ < *inda

References

External links

* Timothy Usher, New Guinea World
Owen Stanley Range
* (ibid.
Proto–Humene–Uare
{{Papuan languages Owen Stanley Range languages Languages of Central Province (Papua New Guinea)