Yareban languages

The Yareban languages are a small family of Trans–New Guinea languages spoken in the "Bird's Tail" (southeastern peninsula) of New Guinea. They are sometimes included in a speculative Southeast Papuan branch of Trans–New Guinea (TNG), but the Southeast Papuan families have not been shown to be any more closely related to each other than they are to other TNG families.

The languages are,

• Moikodi (Doriri)
• Aneme Wake (Abia)
• Barijian: Bariji, Nawaru (Sirio)
• Yareba

Barijian is suggested by lexicostatistics in Dutton (1971). The only pronouns which are known in enough languages to reconstruct are na 1sg and a 2sg, which are common to all Yareban languages.

References

• Ross, Malcolm (2005). "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages". In Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide, Jack Golson, eds. Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 15–66. ISBN 0858835622. OCLC 67292782.