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West Trans-New Guinea languages

New Guinea and Pacific Language Families

The West Trans-New Guinea languages are a suggested linkage of Papuan languages within the Trans-New Guinea family, proposed by Malcolm Ross in his 2005 classification, spoken in the Highlands of western New Guinea, Indonesia, and in East Timor. Ross regards the group as not well established, suspecting it represents an old dialect continuum whose shared features have not been traced to a single ancestor through comparative historical linguistics, and its internal divisions, tentatively including an Irian Highlands group and groupings spanning East Timor, West Bomberai and the Alor-Pantar languages, remain unclear.

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