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Languages The East Bird's Head languages are a hypothetical language family composed of three languages of the "Bird's Head" Peninsula of western New Guinea, spoken by only about 20 000 people in all. Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ...
The linguist who proposed the East Bird's Head hypothesis, Stephen Würm, developed it as part of an initial attempt to classify the Papuan languages on often scanty data, and he does not expect his proposals to stand up well to scrutiny. Many of the features he used to identify the various families stocks, such as characteristic personal pronouns, may turn out to be areal features. The Papuan languages have, for example, shown themselves to be adept at borrowing pronouns. The term Papuan languages refers to those languages of the western Pacific which are neither Austronesian nor Australian. ...
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word that usually takes the place of a noun or noun phrase that was previously mentioned (such as she, it) or that refers to something or someone (I, me, you). Pronouns are often one of the basic parts of speech of the...
An areal feature, in linguistics, is the appearance of a given feature of typology in several unrelated languages due to the influence of geographical closeness. ...
Würm identifies the subdivisions of his Papuan classification as families (on the order of the Germanic languages), stocks (on the order of the Indo-European languages), and phyla (on the order of the Nostratic hypothesis). East Bird's Head is a stock in this terminology. A language that is not related to any other at a family level will be called an isolate in this scheme. The Germanic languages form one of the branches of the Indo-European (IE) language family. ...
The Indo-European languages include some 443 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects, including most of the major language families of Europe, as well as many languages of Southwest and South Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. ...
Nostratic is a highly controversial language super-family that putatively links many Eurasian language families. ...
A language isolate is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical (or genetic) relationship with other living languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common to any other language. ...
Classification East Bird's Head stock (3 languages) - Mantion isolate
- Meax family: Meax, Meningo
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