The island of New Guinea and its offshore islands is arguably the most diverse and least documented linguistic hotspot in the world - home to over 1300 languages, almost one fifth of all living languages, in more than 40 separate families, along with numerous isolates. Traditionally one of the least understood linguistic regions, ongoing research allows for the first time a comprehensive guide. Given the vastness of the region and limited previous overviews, this volume focuses on an account of the families and major languages of each area within the region, including brief grammatical descriptions of many of the languages. The volume also includes a typological overview of Papuan languages, and a chapter on Austronesian-Papuan contact. It will make accessible current knowledge on this complex region, and will be the standard reference on the region. It is aimed at typologists, endangered language specialists, graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and all those interested in linguistic diversity and understanding this least known linguistic region.
Author(s): Bill Palmer (Ed.)
Series: The World of Linguistics Vol. 4
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 1036
Tags: Languages of the New Guinea Area, Linguistics
1 Language families of the New Guinea Area
2 The Trans New Guinea family
3 The Languages of the Sepik-Ramu Basin
and Environs
4 The languages of Northwest New Guinea
5 The Papuan languages of East Nusantara
and the Bird’s Head
6 The languages of Southern New Guinea
7 The Papuan languages of Island Melanesia
8 The morphosyntactic typology of Papuan languages
9 Contact phenomena in Austronesian and Papuan
Languages
General Index
Index of Languages and Language Groupings
Table of Maps
