Papuan languages

Papuan languages are the many language families spoken across New Guinea and nearby islands that are not classified as Austronesian. The label is geographic, not the name of a single language family.

Language family: A group of languages descended from a common ancestral language. Papuan languages comprise numerous families rather than one shared linguistic lineage.
New Guinea: The world's second-largest island, divided between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. It is the principal landmass where Papuan languages are spoken.
Trans–New Guinea languages: A proposed large language family or grouping whose languages are concentrated in New Guinea. It is one of the largest and most influential proposed groupings within Papuan languages.
Sydney Herbert Ray: A British linguist who studied languages of the Pacific and helped establish the term Papuan. His early classifications helped shape the geographic use of the label.
Trans–New Guinea hypothesis: The proposal that many New Guinea languages descend from a common ancestral language. Its scope and internal coherence are central questions in Papuan classification.
Language isolate: A language with no demonstrated genealogical relationship to another language. Some languages conventionally called Papuan have no established relatives.
Papua New Guinea: A country occupying the eastern half of New Guinea and nearby islands. Its extraordinary linguistic diversity includes many Papuan families.
Sepik languages: A group of language families spoken around the Sepik River basin in northern New Guinea. The Sepik region illustrates the dense family-level diversity behind the label.
Stephen Wurm: An Australian linguist known for extensive documentation and classification of New Guinea languages. His classifications strongly influenced later accounts of Papuan language groupings.
Language documentation: The systematic recording and description of languages, including their use and social context. Better records are needed to compare many poorly documented Papuan languages.

Linked from 17 pages