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South Bird's Head

New Guinea and Pacific Language Families

The South Bird's Head or South Doberai languages are a group of Papuan language families spoken in Indonesia's West Papua province, comprising five languages divided into the South Bird's Head proper, Inanwatan and Konda-Yahadian branches. Linguists Malcolm Ross and Timothy Usher have classified them as part of the Trans-New Guinea languages, though Andrew Pawley and Harald Hammarstrom do not consider them to belong to that family, and an alternative hypothesis links them instead to the Berau Gulf languages.

Facts
Proto-Language Status
Partial reconstruction exists at the sub-family level (for example a reconstructable third-person singular pronoun for South Bird's Head proper); the three constituent groups (Konda-Yahadian, Inanwatan-Duriankere, Nuclear South Bird's Head) are tentatively treated as independent families pending further work (Holton and Klamer 2018), so no single proto-South-Bird's-Head language has been fully reconstructed. 1
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Wikipedia: South Bird's Head languages
WikipediaPronouns section
Quote, Pronouns section
3SG *ni is reconstructable for SBH proper.
View the Source
Wikidata: South Bird's Head
Wikidata Q7566330, class allow-list match (w-wdresolver-0926)View the Source
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