East Bird's Head languages

East Bird's Head
Geographic
distribution		 Papua
Linguistic classification

Extended West Papuan ?

Subdivisions
  • Mantion
  • Meax
Glottolog east1459[1]

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East Bird's Head languages (in red)

The East Bird's Head languages form a language family of three languages in the "Bird's Head Peninsula" of western New Guinea, spoken by only 20,000 people in all.

Stephen Wurm identifies the subdivisions of his Papuan classification as families (on the order of the Germanic languages), stocks (on the order of the Indo-European languages), and phyla (on the order of the Nostratic hypothesis). East Bird's Head is a stock in this terminology. A language that is not related to any other at a family level, such as Greek within Indo-European, will be called an isolate in this scheme.

Classification

East Bird's Head stock (3 languages)

Pronouns

The pronouns Ross reconstructs for the family's proto-language are:

Number
Person Singular Plural
exclusive inclusive
1st *da, *di- *meme, *me- *mimi, *mi-
2nd *ba, *bi- *ia, *i-
3rd *e, *- *rua, *ri-

See also

References

  1. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "East Bird's Head". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
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