South Halmahera–West New Guinea languages


The South Halmahera–West New Guinea languages are a branch of the Malayo-Polynesian languages, found in the islands and along the shores of the Halmahera Sea in the Indonesian province of North Maluku and of Cenderawasih Bay in the provinces of Papua and West Papua. There are 38 languages.
The unity of the South Halmahera–West New Guinea subgroup is well supported by lexical and phonological evidence. Blust has proposed that they are most closely related to the Oceanic languages, but this classification is not universally accepted.
Most of the languages are only known from short word lists, but Buli on Halmahera, and Biak and Waropen in Cenderawasih Bay, are fairly well attested.

Classification

Traditionally, the languages are classified into two geographic groups:
The unity of the South Halmahera and Raja Ampat languages is supported by phonological changes noted in Blust and Remijsen. This results in the following structure:
David Kamholz includes these languages as additional branches:
The following languages groups are problematic – they may or may not be SHWNG. Kamholz does not classify them due to lack of data.
The SHWNG languages can be categorized as such :
;South Halmahera–West New Guinea
Kamholz presumes the homeland of proto-SHWNG to be the southern coast of the Cenderawasih Bay.

Typology

At least six SHWNG languages, namely Ma'ya, Matbat, Ambel, Moor, Yaur, and Yerisiam, are tonal. Klamer, et al. suggest that tone in these SHWNG languages originated from contact with Papuan languages of the Raja Ampat Islands that are now extinct. There are few lexical similarities with present-day Papuan languages, except for a few words such as ‘sago’ that are shared with the two tonal Papuan isolates Abun and Mpur :
However, Arnold traces this etymology to proto-Malayo-Polynesian *Rambia ‘sago palm’.
Arnold reconstructs tone for proto-Ma'ya-Matbat and proto-Ambel, but not for proto-SHWNG. Other than tonogenesis, these proto-languages had also gone through monosyllabization.
The VRK Mutation is characteristic of most the SHWNG languages, where the phonemes /ß/, /r/, and /k/ surface as the prenasalized voiced stops , , and in various cluster environments. The mutation is found in the Ambai, Ansus, Biak, Busami, Dusner, Kurudu, Marau, Meoswar, Moor, Munggui, Papuma, Pom, Roon, Roswar, Serewen, Serui-Laut, Umar, Wamesa, Warembori, Waropen, Wooi, Yaur, Yerisiam, and Yoke languages.
Kamholz notes that SHWNG languages have relatively low lexical retention rates from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, pointing to significant influence from non-Austronesian languages.