West Papuan languages
language family of Indonesia
The West Papuan languages are a proposed language family of about two dozen non-Austronesian languages of the Bird's Head Peninsula (Vogelkop or Doberai Peninsula) of far western New Guinea, the island of Halmahera and its vicinity, spoken by about 220,000 people in all. It is not established if they constitute a proper linguistic family or an areal network of genetically unrelated families.
The best known "West Papuan" language is Ternate (50,000 native speakers) of the island of the same name. Along with neighboring Tidore, they are the languages of the rival Ternate and Tidore sultanates, famous for their role in the spice trade.
Origins and contact
The North Halmahera (NH) languages, spoken in the Maluku Islands, share some structural similarities with certain Papuan families in Melanesia, which was noted as far back as 1900. In addition, there is a number of lexical and morphemic correspondences between NH and West Bird’s Head (WBH). These are not easily explainable as chance resemblance. The question then is whether they are due to language contact (i.e., borrowing) or to common descent (i.e., genealogical inheritance). On the other hand, there is little evidence linking the individual families of the Vogelkop Peninsula to each other, with the relationship perhaps better considered areal (i.e., a Sprachbund). In spite of the shared morpho-syntactic features, many of these languages exhibit little in the way of lexical resemblance.
The public source identifies “West Papuan languages” as language family of Indonesia. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around West, Papuan and languages.
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This entry incorporates text from “West Papuan languages” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.