Indo-Pacific languages

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The Indo-Pacific language family proposed by Joseph Greenberg in 1971 consists of the non-Austronesian languages of New Guinea and neighboring islands, the languages of Tasmania, and the languages of the Andaman Islands. The proposal was based on unsystematic observation of lexical similarities rather than the comparative method and has therefore not been widely accepted by linguists. An additional difficulty is the fact that the languages of Tasmania are extinct and so poorly attested that most historical linguists regard them as unclassifiable. The languages in the group are primarily tone languages and feature nouns marked for case, but not necessarily for number, with the SOV word order being most common.^[1]

According to Greenberg, the family consists of fourteen families. He suggested a tentative sub-classification into seven groups, listed in bold below. He presented no evidence for this subgrouping.

Tasmanian

Tasmanian languages

Andamanese

Andamanese languages (perhaps only the Great Andaman languages)

Nuclear New Guinea

Central New Guinea languages
- Kapauku-Baliem languages
- Highlands
- Huon
North New Guinea languages
South New Guinea languages
Southwest New Guinea languages

West Papuan

West New Guinea languages
North Halmahera languages
Timor-Alor languages

East New Guinea

East New Guinea languages

Northeast New Guinea

Northeast New Guinea languages

Pacific

Bougainville languages (see East Papuan languages)
New Britain languages (see East Papuan languages)
Central Melanesian languages (see East Papuan languages)
- Central Solomons languages
- Santa Cruz language

This classification was never widely accepted, and has largely been supplanted by that of Stephen Wurm (see Papuan languages). Both are highly speculative, and generally do not agree well. For example, Greenberg's North New Guinea family corresponds to Wurm's Sko, Sepik-Ramu, and Torricelli families plus the Northern branch of the Trans-New Guinea languages; while Greenberg's West New Guinea family corresponds to the Wurm's East Bird's Head and Geelvink Bay families, the South Bird's Head and West Bomberai branches of Trans-New Guinea, and the Bird's Head branch of the West Papuan languages. However, there are some significant similarities: Greenberg's Northeast New Guinea family closely matches Wurm's Madang-Adelbert Range branch of Trans-New Guinea, while Greenberg's Eastern New Guinea family and Wurm's Eastern Main-Section branch of Trans-New Guinea both preserve Tom Dutton's Southeast New Guinea family.

The greatest controversy concerns the geographic outliers, Tasmanian and Andamanese. While few linguists recognize a connection to Tasmanian, the West Papuan-Andamanese connection has received some support.