Inheritance, contact and change in the New Guinea Highlands evidentiality area

The Highlands of Papuan New Guinea is the location of an evidential Sprachbund that includes
at least fourteen languages from six language families with grammaticized evidentiality. As with
other linguistic features in New Guinea, evidentiality has spread across genealogical boundaries
through repeated language contact. In this paper, we examine likely paths of development of the
various subsystems and the spread of evidentiality as a whole. The evidence presented here
points toward the Engan language family as the most likely source for at least some of the
evidential markers and distinctions found in the region, supporting previous suggestions by other
researchers.