The Finisterre languages are a language family, spoken in the Finisterre Range of Papua New Guinea, classified within the original Trans–New Guinea (TNG) proposal, and William A. Foley considers their TNG identity to be established. They share with the Huon languages a small closed class of verbs taking pronominal object prefixes some of which are cognate across both families (Suter 2012), strong morphological evidence that they are related. The most populous Finisterre languages are Wantoat, Rawa, and Yopno, with about 10,000 speakers apiece, and Iyo, with about half that number.

Internal structure

Huon and Finisterre, and then the connection between them, were identified by Kenneth McElhanon (1967, 1970). They are clearly valid language families. Finisterre contains six clear branches. Beyond that, classification is based on lexicostatistics, which does not provide precise classification results. The outline below follows McElhanon and Carter et al. (2012).

Vocabulary comparison

The following basic vocabulary words are from McElhanon & Voorhoeve (1970) and Retsema et al. (2009), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database: ! ! colspan = "2" | Erap branch ! Gusap-Mot branch ! Uruwa branch ! Wantoat branch ! Warup branch ! Yupna branch ! gloss !! Mungkip !! Uri (Sintogoro dialect) !! Iyo !! Yau (Mup dialect) !! Tuma-Irumu (Irumu dialect) !! Degenan !! Yopno (Nokopo dialect) ! head ! hair ! ear ! eye ! nose ! tooth ! tongue ! leg ! louse ! dog ! pig ! bird ! egg ! blood ! bone ! skin ! breast ! tree ! man ! woman ! sun ! moon ! water ! fire ! stone ! road, path ! name ! eat ! one ! two