Mailuan languages

The Mailuan languages are a small family of Trans–New Guinea languages spoken in the "Bird's Tail" (southeastern peninsula) of New Guinea. They are sometimes included in a speculative Southeast Papuan branch of Trans–New Guinea (TNG), but the Southeast Papuan families have not been shown to be any more closely related to each other than they are to other TNG families.

The languages are,

• Bauwaki–O'oku, Domu, Binahari–Binahari-Ma, Morawa, Mailu (Magi), Laua

All share about 50% vocabulary. Pronouns are:

	sg	du	pl
1	*i	*gu-	*ge
2	*ga	*[y]a	*[y]a, *mee
3		*emu

Dutton (1971) said Bauwaki was a link to the Yareban languages. It has greater lexical similarity with Aneme Wake (Yareban) than the closest Mailuan language, Domu. Magi shows evidence of language shift from an Oceanic language in a large number of Oceanic words.

References

• Ross, Malcolm (2005). "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages". In Andrew Pawley; Robert Attenborough; Robin Hide; Jack Golson. Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 15–66. ISBN 0858835622. OCLC 67292782.