Deep-time diversity: The Oriomo languages of Southern New Guinea

Abstract

Southern New Guinea is a region of almost dizzying linguistic diversity, across every domain: the sheer number of languages spoken, their typological profile, and the number of first-order families they represent. Since Evans (2009), a documentary push emanating from the ANU has begun to grapple with the enormous diversity that exists today, but relatively little work has been done to examine the dynamics or stability of this diversity into the past. This thesis is designed to bring diachronic depth to this synchronic breadth. I target the linguistic prehistory of Oriomo, a small Papuan family consisting of four languages: Wipi, Bine and Gizrra on the mainland of New Guinea, and Meryam Mir in the Torres Strait. I reconstruct Proto-Oriomo using the classical comparative method: phonology and phonological history (in depth) and morphology (more selectively), alongside Oriomo’s internal phylogeny and 160 words of core vocabulary. I find that Proto-Oriomo’s typological profile included features like pronoun clusivity and a contrast between two rhotics, but excluded prenasalized or retroflex consonants, demonstrating the diachronic stability of typological features that set the modern Oriomo languages apart from their neighbours. Phylogenetically, by contrast, I find morphological evidence compatible with the suggestion of a deep-time link with the larger Yam family to the west (Evans et al., 2018).