Rahul Sharma (Editor)

East Bird's Head languages

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Geographic distribution:
  
Papua

Glottolog:
  
east1459

Subdivisions:
  
Mantion Meax

East Bird's Head languages

Linguistic classification:
  
Extended West Papuan ? East Bird's Head – Sentani East Bird's Head

The East Bird's Head languages form a language family of three languages in the "Bird's Head Peninsula" of western New Guinea, spoken by only 20,000 people in all.

Contents

Stephen Wurm identifies the subdivisions of his Papuan classification as families (on the order of the Germanic languages), stocks (on the order of the Indo-European languages), and phyla (on the order of the Nostratic hypothesis). East Bird's Head is a stock in this terminology. A language that is not related to any other at a family level, such as Greek within Indo-European, will be called an isolate in this scheme.

Classification

East Bird's Head stock (3 languages)

  • Mantion (Manikion) isolate
  • Meax family: Meax, Meninggo (Moskona)
  • ? Saponi (contradictory evidence)

    • Pronouns

    The pronouns Ross reconstructs for the family's proto-language are:

    References

    East Bird's Head languages Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA