New Guinea and Pacific Language Families

A language family whose living member languages are documented as indigenous to New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, or the wider Austronesian-speaking Pacific and maritime Southeast Asia, the region linguists call by the macroarea name Papunesia. Belongs here: the Trans-New Guinea family and its many constituent branches, the numerous small Papuan family-level groups and isolates documented across New Guinea's interior and coast, the Austronesian and Malayo-Polynesian families, and the language families of the Bismarck Archipelago and Solomon Islands. Does not belong here: a family whose members are indigenous to the Australian mainland or Tasmania, grouped instead under Australian Language Families, or the Formosan languages of Taiwan, which this atlas groups under Eurasian Language Families. This is the largest of the six groups in current holdings, reflecting genuine extreme family-level fragmentation documented across New Guinea rather than a grouping artifact.