East Bird's Head languages

East Bird's Head
Geographic distribution:	Papua
Linguistic classification:	Extended West Papuan ? East Bird's Head – Sentani East Bird's Head
Subdivisions:	Mantion Meax
Glottolog:	east1459
{{{mapalt}}} East Bird's Head languages (in red)

The East Bird's Head languages form a language family of three languages in the "Bird's Head" Peninsula of western New Guinea, spoken by only 20,000 people in all.

Stephen Wurm identifies the subdivisions of his Papuan classification as families (on the order of the Germanic languages), stocks (on the order of the Indo-European languages), and phyla (on the order of the Nostratic hypothesis). East Bird's Head is a stock in this terminology. A language that is not related to any other at a family level, such as Greek within Indo-European, will be called an isolate in this scheme.

Classification

East Bird's Head stock (3 languages)

• Mantion (Manikion) isolate
• Meax family: Meax, Meninggo (Moskona)
• ? Saponi (contradictory evidence)

Pronouns

The pronouns Ross reconstructs for the family's proto-language are:

	Number
Person	Singular	Plural
		exclusive	inclusive
1st	*da, *di-	*meme, *me-	*mimi, *mi-
2nd	*ba, *bi-	*ia, *i-
3rd	*e, *-	*rua, *ri-

See also

• Papuan languages