The Extended West Papuan language family

Language family

A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...

 is a tentative proposal in Malcolm Ross

Malcolm Ross

Malcolm David Ross is a linguist and professor at the Australian National University. He has published work on Austronesian and Papuan languages, historical linguistics, and language contact.-External links:**...

's classification of Papuan languages

Papuan languages

The Papuan languages are those languages of the western Pacific which are neither Austronesian nor Australian. The term does not presuppose a genetic relationship. The concept of Papuan peoples as distinct from Melanesians was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892.-The...

. It includes the West Papuan languages

West Papuan languages

The West Papuan languages are a hypothetical language family of about two dozen Papuan languages of the Bird's Head Peninsula of far western New Guinea and the island of Halmahera, spoken by about 220 000 people in all....

 of the Indonesia

Indonesia

Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

n island of Halmahera

Halmahera

Halmahera is the largest island in the Maluku Islands. It is part of the North Maluku province of Indonesia.Halmahera has a land area of 17,780 km² and a population in 1995 of 162,728...

 and the Bird's Head Peninsula

Bird's Head Peninsula

The Bird's Head Peninsula or Doberai Peninsula is a large peninsula that makes up the northwest portion of the Province of West Papua, Indonesia.-Location and geography:...

 of far western New Guinea

New Guinea

New Guinea is the world's second largest island, after Greenland, covering a land area of 786,000 km2. Located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, it lies geographically to the east of the Malay Archipelago, with which it is sometimes included as part of a greater Indo-Australian Archipelago...

; the Yawa

Yawa languages

The Yawa languages, or Yapen, are a small family of two closely related Papuan languages, Yawa and Saweru, which are often considered to be divergent dialects of a single language...

 language isolate

Language isolate

A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. They are in effect language families consisting of a single...

 (or small family) on Yapen Island

Yapen

Yapen is an island of western New Guinea, Indonesia. The Yapen Strait separates Yapen and the Biak Islands to the north. It is in Cenderawasih Bay. To the west is Mios Num Strait between it and Mios Num Island, and the east Kurudu Island. The southeast are the Amboi Islands and the southwest...

 in Cenderawasih (Geelvink) Bay

Cenderawasih Bay

Cenderawasih Bay , also Teluk Sarera , formerly Geelvink Bay is a large bay in northern Province of Papua and West Papua, New Guinea, Indonesia, at . The Dutch name comes after a Dutch ship and family called Geelvinck...

, Indonesian New Guinea (previously placed in the hypothetical Geelvink Bay family), and a newly proposed East Bird's Head – Sentani family scattered across northern Indonesian New Guinea.

The Extended West Papuan languages are defined by common first-person

Grammatical person

Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...

 pronouns: da or di for the singular ("I"), and m- for the exclusive ("we"), which are found in all branches of the three constituent families except for the Amberbaken isolate within West Papuan proper.

The families linked by these various proposals are thus,

• West Papuan
  West Papuan languages
  The West Papuan languages are a hypothetical language family of about two dozen Papuan languages of the Bird's Head Peninsula of far western New Guinea and the island of Halmahera, spoken by about 220 000 people in all....
  
  
• Yawa
  Yawa languages
  The Yawa languages, or Yapen, are a small family of two closely related Papuan languages, Yawa and Saweru, which are often considered to be divergent dialects of a single language...
  
  
• East Bird's Head – Sentani

Pronouns

The pronominal evidence connecting these families is at least as strong as the evidence for classifying Borai-Hattam as West Papuan. The relevant pronouns are "I", "thou", and "we" (exclusive).

family	I	thou	we
West Papuan	*da, *di-	*na, *ni, *a-	*mam, *mi
EBH-Sentani	*da, *di	*ba~wa, *bi	*meme, *me
Yava	*rei	*wein	(imama etc.)

All have forms in *d for "I" and *m for "we". (Most Yawa forms of "we" also have m, such as imama, but they are too diverse for an easy reconstruction.) EBH-Sentani and Yava have bilabials for "thou".