Trans-New Guinea

node · earth · New Guinea and neighbouring islands

The largest proposed grouping among the Papuan languages of New Guinea and neighbouring islands, and the clearest illustration in this Journey of how much a family's security varies. New Guinea holds the densest concentration of languages on Earth — of the order of eight hundred to a thousand in a single large island — most of them spoken by small communities in terrain that isolates valley from valley. Trans-New Guinea was proposed in the 1970s on the basis of shared pronoun forms and lexical resemblances across the central cordillera, and it is now generally accepted that a large family exists there. What is far less settled is its membership and its internal structure: proposals have differed by hundreds of languages, many of the constituent groups remain thinly documented, and no reconstruction remotely comparable to Proto-Indo-European or Proto-Austronesian exists. Papuan is not a family at all but a residual term for the non-Austronesian languages of the region, covering many independent families and isolates. The contrast with Austronesian, whose speakers arrived in the same seas far more recently and whose tree is well resolved, is a lesson in what documentation and time depth do to evidence.