Indo-Pacific Languages

Indo-Pacific Languages

Indo-Pacific is a hypothetical language macrofamily proposed in 1971 by Joseph Greenberg. Supporters of Indo-Pacific see it as an extremely ancient and internally diverse family. It would group into a single language family the Papuan languages of New Guinea and Melanesia, and also includes the languages of the Andaman Islands and the languages of Tasmania, both of which are remote from New Guinea. Greenberg explicitly excludes from Indo-Pacific the languages of Australia. The hypothesis is not widely accepted, since it was based on rough estimation of lexical similarity and typological similarity. New Guinea is often seen as a case of extreme diversity of language lineages by worldwide standards. Stephen Wurm's Trans–New Guinea languages family is a more widely entertained proposal.