The Greater West Bomberai Language Family

This paper demonstrates the existence of the Greater West Bomberai family, bringing the Timor–Alor–Pantar language family of the Lesser Sunda islands into a genealogical unit with the Papuan languages of the western part of the Bomberai peninsula in New Guinea. Applying the comparative method to the increasingly available data from these languages, we demonstrate their relatedness on the basis of forty-seven lexical cognate sets with largely regular sound correspondences. Grammatical evidence in the form of pronouns is invoked to further demonstrate the relatedness of these languages. Loans from Austronesian languages have been identified and eliminated from our comparisons. Establishing the family has repercussions for our view of Island Southeast Asian prehistory, entailing the existence of maritime Papuan-language-speaking groups from an early time.