Indo-Pacific languages

The Indo-Pacific macrofamily of languages is a hypothetical and controversial macrofamily of languages that groups together some other families of languages spoken mainly in Papua New Guinea, Tasmania and islands of the Indian Ocean, proposed as phylogenetic unit in 1971 by Joseph Greenberg.

Indo-Pacific languages are made up of languages from four geographic areas:

• language (Nepal)
• Languages of the Andaman Islands (India).
• Papu languages (New Guinea)
  • Amto-Musan languages
  • Languages of the Andaman Islands
  • Eastern languages of the Bird Head
  • Eastern Papu languages
  • Eastern Geelvink Bay languages
  • Kwomtari-baibai languages
  • left May languages
  • Sepik-Ramu languages
  • Sko languages
  • Tasmanian languages
  • Torricelli languages
  • Trans-neoguinean languages
  • Western Papu languages
• Tasmanian languages (Australia)

The family was proposed by Merritt Ruhlen in A guide to the world's languages, but is not accepted by most of the scientific community. In part, this rejection has a methodological background, since neither exhaustive nor rigorous use is made of the comparative method, the only universally accepted one to prove the genetic relationship of a group of languages.

Criticism of the hypothesis

The continental mass of Sahul before rising ocean level separated Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania after the last glacial era.

In addition to not being accepted by most historical linguists, from an archaeological point of view the Indo-Pacific hypothesis is meaningless. It is known that the first settlers of New Guinea arrived there about 40,000 years ago. It is believed that at that time New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania formed a large united land mass, so the first settlers would have been distributed throughout that territory. Between 14,000 and 7,000 years ago the sea level rose and both Tasmania and New Guinea were separated from Australia. If there is a traceable relationship between the languages of New Guinea and those of Tasmania it must necessarily include the intermediate populations of Australia as well, since the languages of all three land masses must go back to the earliest settlers. That is, if there is a common ancestor of the Papuan and Tasmanian languages, it must also be the common ancestor of the Australian languages. However, given the long period of time that has elapsed, even if a Proto-New Guinean-Australian-Tasmanian existed, it would not be reconstructable by the means of historical linguistics, and most linguists would then not accept that kinship could be firmly proven.

As for the peoples of the Andaman Islands, genetically they seem to be closer to the peoples who colonized New Guinea and Australia than to other Asian peoples, but equally the time period would not allow us to recognize the linguistic relationship had they existed. But undoubtedly the most criticized of the Indo-Pacific hypothesis is the inclusion of a language spoken in the Himalayas, Kusunda, which seems difficult to relate archaeologically to the first settlers of New Guinea.