Marind is a

Papuan language The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non-Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geogra ...

spoken in Malind District,

Merauke Regency Merauke Regency is a regency in the far south of the Indonesian province of South Papua. It covers an area of 46,791.63 km2, and had a population of 195,716 at the 2010 Census and 230,932 at the 2020 Census; the official estimate as at mid 2 ...

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

by over ten thousand people. Dialects are Southeast Marind, Gawir, Holifoersch, and Tugeri. Bian Marind (Northwest Marind), also known as Boven-Mbian, is divergent enough to not be

mutually intelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an ...

, and has been assigned a separate ISO code. Marind separates the

Trans-Fly–Bulaka River languages The Trans-Fly – Bulaka River South-Central Papuan languages form a hypothetical family of Papuan languages. They include many of the languages west of the Fly River in southern Papua New Guinea into southern Indonesian West Papua, plus a pair ...

, which would otherwise occupy a nearly continuous stretch of southern New Guinea.

References

Further reading