The Mek languages are a well established family of Papuan languages spoken by the Mek people and the Yali people. They form a branch of the Trans-New Guinea languages in the classifications of both Stephen Wurm (1975) and Malcolm Ross (2005).
Facts
RegionCentral highlands of Papua province, Indonesia, in the area historically known as Irian Jaya, occupied by the Mek people and the Yali people near the border with Papua New Guinea. 1 Proto-Language StatusA proto-language, proto-Mek, has been reconstructed by Usher (2020), including consonant and vowel inventories, pronoun forms and basic vocabulary, building on the family's established position within Trans-New Guinea in the classifications of Stephen Wurm (1975) and Malcolm Ross (2005). 1 Connections
Open Questions
Source Wikipedia: Mek Languages
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Mek Languages
Wikimedia FoundationWikipedia article, Further reading sectionQuote, Wikipedia article, Further reading section
Heeschen, Volker. 1978. The Mek languages of Irian Jaya with special reference to the Eipo language. Irian 7(2): 3-46.
Open Questions (1 open question)
How many speakers do the Mek languages total today?
Individually published counts for the roughly six to eight Mek languages come from different decades (for example Eipo-era figures from the 1980s versus more recent fieldwork on other members) and have not been reconciled into one family-wide total by any single source consulted this pass.
What would resolve this A current, single-source survey (an Ethnologue edition or a published linguistic survey) giving directly comparable, similarly dated speaker figures for every Mek language.
Trans-New Guinea linguistics, language documentation.Wikipedia: Mek Languages
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