DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14470703
title: Papuan languages and families (a list)

description: There are three files in this bundle. They list all Papuan languages and families:
Papuan_families_Glottocodes.txt
Papuan_families_names.csv
Papuan_languages.csv



Papuan_families.csv lists all Papuan language families and isolates. 
It was generated from the listing at https://glottolog.org/glottolog/family by first filtering for the macro-area Papunesia.
The following families were removed in order to come up with a listing of just Papuan families and isolates:


Austronesian    Top-level family    Africa, Eurasia, Papunesia, South America    747    1272
Indo-European    Top-level family    Africa, Australia, Eurasia, North America, Papunesia, South America    346    585
Bookkeeping    Top-level family    Africa, Australia, Eurasia, North America, Papunesia, South America    1    390
Sign Language    Top-level family    Africa, Australia, Eurasia, North America, Papunesia, South America    50    223
Unclassifiable    Top-level family    Africa, Australia, Eurasia, North America, Papunesia, South America    0    121
Pidgin    Top-level family    Africa, Australia, Eurasia, North America, Papunesia, South America    48    84
Unattested    Top-level family    Africa, Australia, Eurasia, North America, Papunesia, South America    18    68
Artificial Language    Top-level family    Africa, Australia, Eurasia, North America, Papunesia    2    31
Japonic    Top-level family    Eurasia, Papunesia    11    17
Speech Register    Top-level family    Africa, Eurasia, Papunesia, South America    7    15


The result is 71 families and 52 isolates


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Papuan_languages.csv file was generated from the file (NG_area_australia_papunesia_glottolog_4.8.csv) by Hedvig Skirgård (https://github.com/HedvigS/personal-cookbook/blob/main/R/example_data/NG_area_australia_papunesia_glottolog_4.8.tsv) cleaned  byː    
removing irrelevant countries (including AU, but kept Meriam meri1244, thanks to R. Barlow for pointing it out)   
removing the following families ː    
aust1307    Austronesian
unat1236    unattested
uncl1493    unclassified
indo1319    indoeuropean
pidg1258    pidgins and creoles
sign1238    sign languages
book1242    “bookkeeping” languages in Glottolog



Notes on Hedvig's original file by herself:
" Malcolm Ross suggested an area called "New Guinea Region", and I've made a table of languages in glottolog 4.8 tagged for this. I find it useful when discussions of "Papuan" languages are brought up, as languages inside of this area that aren't Austronesian is often what people mean by the label. It's still useful to break down by smaller regions and families most of the time.


Notes:


    I've followed Ross' illustrations as closely as I can
    Guadacanal, Nggela and Temotu are not included in NG area
    Talbot and Saibai are not included
    Polynesian languages Takuu and Nukuria are included, as far as I can tell. If you don't want them included, remove them.
    Kusini is included
    I only tagged this for languages in glottolog, not families or dialects
    Languages without Longitude Latitude weren't tagged


Ref:


Ross, M. (2017). Languages of the New Guinea region. The Cambridge handbook of areal linguistics, 758-820."



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Papuan_families_Glottocodes.txt was generated by listing all family Glottocodes in the Papuan_languages.csv file and then sort | uniq. 
NA = isolate.