Trans-New Guinea Languages

The Trans-New Guinea proposal is the largest single grouping of Papuan languages, uniting several hundred languages across the highlands and much of the interior of the island of New Guinea under a single very large, still debated family first expanded to its broadest scope by Stephen Wurm in the 1960s and 1970s and narrowed substantially by later scholars including Malcolm Ross, Andrew Pawley and Harald Hammarstrom. This group holds every New Guinea and Pacific Language Families member whose sourced description identifies it as Trans-New Guinea, Nuclear Trans New Guinea or a named family within the wider proposal, including the Madang, Finisterre-Huon, Kainantu-Goroka, Engan, Angan, Eleman, Goilalan and Teberan families and their own recognized branches, gathering the family's enormous internal diversity into one place rather than minting a group of one or two for each small constituent family.