Pyu is a
language isolate
Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The num ...
spoken in
Papua New Guinea. As of 2000, the language had about 100 speakers. It is spoken in Biake No. 2 village () of Biake ward,
Green River Rural LLG in
Sandaun Province.
Classification
Timothy Usher links the Pyu language to its neighbors, the
Left May languages and the
Amto–Musan languages
Amto–Musan is a language family of two closely related but mutually unintelligible Papuan languages, Amto and Siawi, spoken along the Samaia River of Sandaun Province of Papua New Guinea.
Languages
Foley (2018) and Usher (2020) agree that t ...
, in as Arai–Samaia stock.
An automated computational analysis (
ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)
[Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ]
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'. found lexical similarities with
Kimki. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.
Based on limited lexical evidence, Pyu had been linked to the putative
Kwomtari–Fas family, but that family is apparently spurious and Foley (2018) notes that Pyu and Kwomtari are highly divergent from each other. Some similar pronoun found in both
Kwomtari and Pyu:
:
Vocabulary
The following basic vocabulary words are from Conrad & Dye (1975) and Voorhoeve (1975), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database:
:
References
External links
Pyu language word list at TransNewGuinea.org
{{language families
Language isolates of New Guinea
Languages of Papua New Guinea
Endangered language isolates
Arai–Samaia languages