Indo-Pacific languages

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Indo-Pacific is a language family proposed in 1971 by Joseph Greenberg. It groups all of the languages of New Guinea into a single language family, except for those belonging to the Austronesian family. These languages were previously believed to belong to a large number of different language families. It also includes languages spoken on several other islands in the region. In addition, it includes the languages of the Andaman Islands and the languages of Tasmania, at a very great distance from New Guinea. Greenberg explicitly excludes from Indo-Pacific the languages of Australia (1971:808).

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[edit] Support

The proposal was based on rough estimation of lexical similarity and typological similarity and has not reached a stage where it can be confirmed by the standard comparative method, including the reconstruction of a protolanguage, and has therefore not been widely accepted by linguists.

The greatest controversy concerns the geographic outliers, Andamanese and Tasmanian. The languages of Tasmania are extinct and so poorly attested that many historical linguists regard them as unclassifiable, though proposed connections to the Australian languages have also been made.

Since then, the languages of New Guinea have been intensively studied by Stephen Wurm.

[edit] Other connections suggested

It has been suggested that the Kusunda language might be an Indo-Pacific language[1].

William Foley (1986) noted lexical similarities between R.M.W. Dixon's 1980 reconstruction of proto-Australian and the languages of the East New Guinea Highlands. He believed that it was naïve to expect to find a single Papuan or Australian language family when New Guinea and Australia had been a single landmass for most of their human history, having been separated by the Torres Strait only 8000 years ago, and that a deep reconstruction would likely include languages from both. However, Dixon later abandoned his proto-Australian proposal,[1] and Foley's ideas need to be re-evaluated in light of recent research.

The Ongan languages may actually be related to the Austric languages and thus not be part of Indo-Pacific (Blevins, 2007).

The classification of the Tasmanian languages has been very difficult to establish [2] and while some similarities with other Australian languages have occasionally been claimed, too little is known about languages in Australia before the spread of the Pama-Nyungan languages for close relationships to ever be likely to be found.

Possible links between the Trans-New Guinea languages and the Borean languages have also been suggested, but these remain too scarce to establish a firm connection.[3] However, this would support the theory of their being a later arrival than the other Papuan languages.

Morris Swadesh grouped the Papuan and Australian languages in his Macro-Australian family.

[edit] Alternative Theories

Wurm has suggested that the Papuan languages represent several migrations into New Guinea and thus aren't necessarily all related to each other. He believed that the earliest (surviving at least) languages families were related to the Australian languages, a possible example being the Sepik-Ramu languages[4][5]. He believed that some languages including the West Papuan languages, Torricelli languages and perhaps the East Papuan languages represent another migration, perhaps related to the Andamanese languages (at least through a substratum)[6]. A further migration more recently brought the Trans New Guinea languages[7]. While Wurm noticed some similarities with the languages of South East Asia, he attributed these to contact as opposed to a genetic relationship.

[edit] Typology

The languages in the group are primarily tone languages. They feature nouns marked for case but not necessarily for number. SOV word order is the most common. (O'Grady et al. 1997:400.)

[edit] Subdivision

According to Greenberg, the family consists of fourteen families. He suggested a tentative sub-classification into seven groups, listed in bold below.

This classification was never widely accepted, and has largely been supplanted by that of Stephen Wurm (see Papuan languages). They do not generally agree well. For example:

The few similarities are retentions from earlier linguists' work:

  • Greenberg's Northeast New Guinea family closely matches Wurm's Madang-Adelbert Range branch of Trans–New Guinea
  • Greenberg's Eastern New Guinea family and Wurm's Eastern Main-Section branch of Trans–New Guinea both preserve Tom Dutton's Southeast New Guinea family.

Although the details differ greatly, Greenberg's proposal that the non-Austronesian languages of New Guinea form a single language family has been partially validated by Wurm's work (see Trans–New Guinea languages).

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Dixon, R. M. W. 2002. Australian Languages: Their Nature and Development. Cambridge University Press
  • Greenberg, Joseph H. 1971. "The Indo-Pacific hypothesis." In Current Trends in Linguistics, Vol. 8: Linguistics in Oceania, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, 808-71. The Hague: Mouton. (Reprinted in Greenberg, Genetic Linguistics, 2005, 193-275.)
  • Greenberg, Joseph H. 2005. Genetic Linguistics: Essays on Theory and Method, edited by William Croft. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • O'Grady, Dobrovolsky, Katamba. 1997. Contemporary Linguistics.
  • Usher, Timothy. "A comparison of Greenberg's and Wurm's classifications." In Greenberg, Genetic Linguistics, 2005, 261-269. (Systematic tabulation of the two sets of results.)
  • Wurm, Stephen A. 1982. The Papuan Languages of Oceania. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

[edit] External links

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