East New Guinea Highlands languages

East New Guinea Highlands
(obsolete)
Geographic
distribution		Papua New Guinea
Linguistic classificationProposed language family
GlottologNone

East New Guinea Highlands is a 1960 proposal by Stephen Wurm for a family of Papuan languages spoken in Papua New Guinea that formed part of his 1975 expansion of Trans–New Guinea.[1]

History of classification

The original proposal consisted of West-Central (Engan), Central (Chimbu–Wahgi), East-Central (Goroka), and Eastern (Kainantu). Duna and Kalam were added in 1971. East New Guinea Highlands was broken up by Malcolm Ross in his 2005 classification (see below), but all branches were retained, and all remain within the now expanded Trans–New Guinea. This language grouping should not be confused with the East Papuan languages, a separate hypothesis.

Family division

Ross classified each of the families in bold as a separate branch of TNG, with the exceptions of Kainantu and Goroka, which he kept together; Kalam, which he linked to the Rai Coast family; and Kenati, which he had insufficient data to classify but which has since been associated with Kainantu.

Ross believes that these languages lie near the homeland of proto–Trans New Guinea.

See also

References

  1. ^ East New Guinea Highlands in the 15th edition of Ethnologue (and a few languages which escaped [1])
  • v
  • t
  • e
Papuan language families
(Palmer 2018 classification)
Trans-New Guinea
subgroups
Central Papua, Indonesia
Southeast Papua, Indonesia
Southwest Papua New Guinea
Central Papua New Guinea
Papuan Peninsula
Eastern Nusantara
families and isolatesBird's Head Peninsula
families and isolatesNorthern Western New Guinea
families and isolatesCentral Western New Guinea
families and isolatesSepik-Ramu basin
families and isolates
Torricelli subgroups
Sepik subgroups
Ramu subgroups
Gulf of Papua and southern New Guinea
families and isolatesBismarck Archipelago and Solomon Islands
families and isolatesRossel Island
isolateProposed groupingsProto-language