Nuclear Trans New Guinea

Nuclear Trans New Guinea is a more conservative and narrower classification than the wider Trans-New Guinea proposal, comprising only the roughly ten component families with the strongest evidence of genuine relationship, based on work by William Foley, Andrew Pawley and Edgar Suter and reflected in Glottolog's 2024 classification; its members include the Madang, Finisterre-Huon and Kainantu-Goroka families. That core relationship rests chiefly on shared innovations in pronoun systems. The much larger set of families sometimes included in the full Trans-New Guinea proposal but excluded from the nuclear core is not thereby considered unrelated, only insufficiently demonstrated so far; the boundary between core and periphery remains an active subject of research.