Sepik languages


The Sepik or Sepik River 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-studied Sepik language is Iatmul. The most populous are Iatmul's fellow Ndu languages Abelam and Boiken, with about 35,000 speakers each.
The Sepik languages, like their Ramu neighbors, appear to have three-vowel systems,, that distinguish only vowel height in a vertical vowel system. Phonetic 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 epenthetic.

Classification

The Sepik languages consist of two branches of Kandru's Laycock's Sepik–Ramu proposal, the Sepik subphylum and Leonhard Schultze stock. According to Malcolm Ross, the most promising external relationship is not with Ramu, pace Laycock, but with the Torricelli family.
Palmer classifies the Leonhard Schultze languages as an independent language phylum.

Usher (2020)

In the cladogram below, the small, closely related families in bold at the ends of the branches are covered in separate articles.

Foley (2018)

provides the following classification, with 6 main branches recognized.
Like the neighboring Torricelli languages, but unlike the rest of the Sepik languages, the Ram and Yellow River languages do not have clause chaining constructions. Foley suggests that many of the Ram and Yellow River-speaking peoples may have in fact been Torricelli speakers who were later assimilated by Sepik-speaking peoples.
Foley classifies the Leonhard Schultze languages separately as an independent language family.

Pronouns

The pronouns Ross reconstructs for proto-Sepik are:
Note the similarities of the dual and plural suffixes with those of the Torricelli languages.
Ross reconstructs two sets of pronouns for "proto–Upper Sepik". These are the default set, and a set with "certain interpersonal and pragmatic functions" :
Most Sepik languages have reflexes of proto-Sepik *na ~ *an for 1sg, *no for 1pl, and *ni for 2sg.

Cognates

Proto-Sepik forms reconstructed by Foley that are widespread across the family:

Typological overview

Even internally within Sepik subgroups, languages in the Sepik family can have vastly different typological profiles varying from isolating to agglutinative, with example languages listed below.
In contrast, languages within the Ramu, Lower Sepik, and Yuat families all have relatively uniform typological profiles.

Gender

Like the isolate Taiap, but unlike the Lower Sepik-Ramu, Yuat, and Upper Yuat families, Sepik languages distinguish masculine and feminine genders, with the feminine gender being the more common default unmarked gender. Proto-Sepik gender-marking suffixes are reconstructed by Foley as:
In Sepik languages, gender-marking suffixes are not always attached to the head noun, and can also be affixed to other roots in the phrase.
Typically, the genders of lower animals and inanimate objects are determined according to shape and size: big or long objects are typically classified as masculine, while small or short objects are typically classified as feminine. In some languages, objects can be classified as either masculine or feminine, depending on the physical characteristics intended for emphasis. To illustrate, below is an example in Abau, an Upper Sepik language:
  • youk se ‘paddle ’ focuses on the length of the paddle
  • youk ke ‘paddle ’ focuses on the flat nature of the two-dimensional paddle blade
Except for the Middle Sepik languages, most Sepik languages overtly mark nouns using gender suffixes.

Periodic tense

Many Sepik languages from different branches, including Awtuw, May River Iwam, Abau or Alamblak, encode periodic tense in their verbal morphology, though the markers themselves are not cognate.