PAPUAN LANGUAGES

group of languages spoken in an area centred upon New Guinea and extending from the islands of Alor, Halmahera, and Timor in the west to the Santa Cruz Archipelago in the east. The Papuan languages include approximately 740 languages, used by about 3,000,000 speakers. The term Papuan was originally employed merely to distinguish these languages from the Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) and Australian languages, and, until the second half of the 20th century, most Papuan languages were believed to be unrelated to each other. Intensive research by teams of linguists since the late 1950s, however, has resulted in a revolutionary change in the Papuan linguistic picture, and it is now known that about 350, and perhaps even as many as 450, of the approximately 740 identified Papuan languages are related. More than 500 of these are spoken by 2,900,000 speakers, who occupy almost three-quarters of the New Guinea mainland. Belonging to 76105 language families (depending on the classification used), these languages together form the Central New Guinea macrophylum. (A macrophylum is a group of languages related less closely than those of a language family or stock.) Recent extensive research into the Papuan languages has resulted in the preliminary classification of most of them. Numerous new languages have been discovered, though large areas, mainly in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, remain unknown. Despite the concentration of research on discovery and classification, a number of grammatical and lexical studies have been prepared, and folklore has been collected. The Summer Institute of Linguistics, an association of Protestant missionaries specializing in studying primitive languages and involved in literacy training and Bible translation, has carried out an extensive native language literacy program in New Guinea with a measure of success. Additional reading Most earlier general studies of Papuan languages have become obsolete. Comprehensive recent bibliographical and factual information may be found in two essays in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 8, part 1 (1971): D.C. Laycock and C.L. Voorhoeve, History of Research in Papuan Languages, pp. 509540; and Stephen A. Wurm, The Papuan Linguistic Situation, pp. 541657Wurm's essay is updated in his book Papuan Languages of Oceania (1972). Individual language descriptions are given in H. McKaughan (ed.), Languages of the Eastern Family (1971). Extensive descriptive and comparative materials on Papuan languages appear in the serial publications Pacific Linguistics.