Sepik languages

Sepik
Geographic distribution:	New Guinea
Linguistic classification:	One of the world's primary language families
Subdivisions:	Walio Biksi Upper Sepik Ram Tama Yellow River Middle Sepik Sepik Hill
Glottolog:	sepi1257

The Sepik languages are a family of some 50 Papuan languages spoken in the Sepik river basin of northern Papua New Guinea, proposed by Donald Laycock in 1965 in a somewhat more limited form than presented here. They tend to have simple phonologies, with few consonants or vowels and usually no tones.

The best known Sepik language is Iatmül. The most populous are Iatmül's fellow Ndu languages Abelam and Boiken, with about 35 000 speakers apiece.

The Sepik languages, like their Ramu neighbors, appear to have three-vowel systems, /ɨ ə a/, that distinguish only vowel height. Phonetic [i e o u] are a result of palatal and labial assimilation to adjacent consonants. It is suspected that the Ndu languages may reduce this to a two-vowel system, with /ɨ/ epenthetic (Foley 1986).

Classification

The classification used here is that of Malcolm Ross. It consists of two branches of Laycock's Sepik–Ramu proposal, the Sepik subphylum and Leonhard Schultze stock. The latter has been tentatively broken up by Ross into its constituent families, Walio and Papi, with Papi reassigned to the Sepik Hill branch of Sepik. The proposal is based on similar pronoun paradigms, but its internal structure is subject to revision. According to Ross, the most promising external relationship is not with Ramu, pace Laycock, but with the Torricelli family.

In the cladogram below, the small "families" at the ends of the branches are clearly valid units. Higher nodes (Upper Sepik, Middle Sepik, Sepik Hill) are less certain; Ethnologue (2009) accepts only Sepik Hill, Foley (2005) Sepik Hill and Middle Sepik.

Sepik	Walio family ? Biksi  Upper Sepik  Abau Iwam family Wogamusin family Ram family Tama family Yellow River family  Middle Sepik  Yerakai Nukuma family Ndu family  Sepik Hill  Sanio family Bahinemo family Alamblak family ? Papi family

There is little evidence that the two alleged Papi languages are related to each other.

Pronouns

The pronouns Ross reconstructs for proto-Sepik are:

I	*wan	we two	*na-nd, *na-p	we	*na-m
thou (M)	*mɨ-n	you two	*kwə-p	you	*kwə-m
thou (F)	*yɨ-n, *nyɨ-n
he	*ətə-d, *də	they two	*ətə-p, *tɨ-p	they	*ətə-m, *tɨ-m
she	*ətə-t, *tɨ

Note the similarities of the dual and plural suffixes with those of the Torricelli languages.

See also

• Papuan languages
• Sepik–Ramu languages
• Donald Laycock