- Title
- Language families of the New Guinea area
- Creator
- Palmer, Bill
- Relation
- The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide p. 1-16
- Relation
- World of Linguistics 4
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110295252-001
- Publisher
- De Gruyter Mouton
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- The New Guinea Area is arguably the region with the highest level of language diversity on earth, in terms of both total number of languages, and number of apparently unrelated language families. On the basis of present knowledge, it is home to more than 1,300 languages, almost one fifth of the world's total number, belonging to upward of 40 distinct language families with no generally accepted wider phylogenetic links, as well as several dozen isolates. It is also the world's least documented linguistic region. Of Hammarström's (2010) list of the 27 least documented families (including isolates) in the world, 20 are located in this area. In some cases, an entire family is known only from a few short wordlists of its members. The region is also the locus of considerable language endangerment. Many of its languages are spoken by a few hundred or very few thousand people, and extensive pressure from larger languages is common, including from larger indigenous languages supplanting smaller languages, and from lingua francas such as Tok Pisin in the east and Papuan Malay in the west. For the exceptionally complex Sepik-Ramu basin, for example, Foley (this volume chapter 3) states that "virtually all languages within the Sepik-Ramu basin are endangered, some critically so" (Foley's emphasis). The sheer number of languages that are largely unknown to research, together with the rapid pace of language loss, means the complete phylogenetic and typological picture of the area may never be fully known. This volume sets out to give an overview of the languages, families and typology of this area on the basis of current knowledge.
- Subject
- New Guinea area; language; language diversity; language families
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1409817
- Identifier
- uon:36064
- Identifier
- ISBN:9783110286427
- Language
- eng
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