Language as a lens into the prehistory of West New Guinea

With over 260 languages belonging to some 30 families and a further 18 language isolates, West
New Guinea is one of the most linguistically diverse regions on the planet. Despite this diversity,
many languages of the region share similarities in their vocabularies and structure. While some of
these similarities can be explained by inheritance from a common ancestor, others are due to contact and borrowing between different language groups. By teasing apart the reasons underlying these similarities, the linguistic data can provide valuable insights into ancient population movements and contacts in the region. I begin with an overview of the language families of West New Guinea. A broad distinction can be made between languages belonging to the Austronesian family, and those belonging to the many unrelated ‘Papuan’ families. The Austronesian languages are relatively recent incomers to the area; speakers of an ancestor to many of these languages probably arrived in Cenderawasih Bay some 3500 years ago. The Papuan families, on the other hand, are endemic to New Guinea—at least some are probably descendants of languages spoken by the original colonisers of Sahul. Following this, I turn to the linguistic evidence for contact between different language groups, paying particular attention to the quantity and quality of this contact. The data show that West New Guinea has long been an area of complex and intense interactions between different language groups. In some cases, these were trading relationships, whereas in others contact was more prolonged, involving intermarriage between different communities. Similarly, the patterns of borrowing suggest that in some cases Austronesian groups were socio-politically dominant; in others, the dominant groups were Papuan. With the recent developments in archaeological and ethnographic studies in West New Guinea, now is the perfect time to take stock, and compare findings with scholars of parallel disciplines. The overview of linguistic research presented in this chapter provides just such a point of calibration, and as such contributes a valuable context to interpret the chapters in the rest of this volume.