Sepik Languages

The Sepik languages are a family of roughly a hundred languages spoken across the Sepik river basin of northern Papua New Guinea, first proposed as a coherent family by Donald Laycock in 1965 and since refined by later classifications that link its several branches, including the well known Ndu languages, the Sepik Hill languages and a scatter of smaller branches along the river's tributaries. This group holds every New Guinea and Pacific Language Families member whose sourced description identifies it as Sepik, Sepik Hill or Middle Sepik, or as a named branch of the Sepik family, distinguishing it from the neighboring and unrelated Ramu and Torricelli families with which it is sometimes loosely discussed because of shared geography rather than shared ancestry.