St. Matthias languages
Oceanic languages spoken in the St. Matthias Islands
The St. Matthias languages are a small group of Oceanic languages spoken in the St. Matthias Islands of New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea.
They are generally treated as a distinct subgroup within the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family.
The group consists of two languages:
Mussau-Emira
Tenis
They are generally treated as a distinct subgroup within the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family.
Classification
The St. Matthias languages are generally recognized as a distinct subgroup of the Oceanic languages consisting of Mussau-Emira and Tenis. Malcolm Ross identified the group as separate from the major Western Oceanic linkages, and later classifications have continued to treat the St. Matthias languages as an independent branch or linkage within Oceanic.
Ross, Pawley and Osmond (2016) classified the St.
“St. Matthias languages” enters the record as oceanic languages spoken in the St. Matthias Islands. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Matthias, languages and Oceanic can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “St. Matthias 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.