Taiap language

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Taiap
Spoken in:	Papua New Guinea
Region:	Gapun village (East Sepik Province)
Total speakers:	80 (2000)
Language family:	language isolate Taiap
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`paa`
ISO 639-3:	`gpn`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

Taiap (also called Gapun, after the name of the village where it is spoken) is an endangered language isolate spoken by around a hundred people in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. It is being replaced by the national language and lingua franca Tok Pisin.

The first European to come across Taiap was a German missionary in 1938. The language wasn't studied by linguists until the 1970s due to the inaccessiblity of the region. Although Wurm (1975) placed Taiap in his Sepik Ramu language family, its structure and vocabulary would be unique for that family, and Ross (2005) found no evidence that it is related to any language of New Guinea. The current extent of Taiap is nearly coincident with what had been an offshore island 6000 years ago (map), consistent with the idea that Taiap is a language isolate.