The Madang or Madang–Adelbert Range languages are a language family of Papua New Guinea. They were classified as a branch of Trans–New Guinea by Stephen Wurm, followed by Malcolm Ross. William A. Foley concurs that it is "highly likely" that the Madang languages are part of TNG, although the pronouns, the usual basis for classification in TNG, have been "replaced" in Madang. Timothy Usher finds that Madang is closest to the Upper Yuat River languages and other families to its west, but does not for now address whether this larger group forms part of the TNG family. The family is named after Madang Province and the Adelbert Range.

History

Sidney Herbert Ray identified the Rai Coast family in 1919. In 1951 these were linked with the Mabuso languages by Arthur Capell to create his Madang family. John Z'graggen (1971, 1975) expanded Madang to languages of the Adelbert Range and renamed the family Madang–Adelbert Range, and Stephen Wurm (1975) adopted this as a branch of his Trans–New Guinea phylum. For the most part, Malcolm Ross's (2005) Madang family includes the same languages as Z'graggen Madang–Adelbert Range, but the internal classification is different in several respects, such as the dissolution of the Brahman branch.

Internal classification

The languages are as follows: The time depth of Madang is comparable to that of Austronesian or Indo-European.

Pronouns

Ross (2000) reconstructed the pronouns as follows: ! !!sg!!pl !1 !2 !3 These are not the common TNG pronouns. However, Ross postulates that the TNG dual suffixes *-le and *-t remain, and suggests that the TNG pronouns live on as Kalam verbal suffixes.

Evolution

Madang family reflexes of proto-Trans-New Guinea (pTNG) etyma:

Family-wide innovations

Croisilles

Garuh language: Pay language: Proto-Northern Adelbert:

Kalam

Kalam language (most closely related to the Rai Coast languages):

Rai Coast

Dumpu language:

Southern Adelbert

Sirva language:

Proto-language

The following selected reconstructions of Proto-Madang by Ross (2014) are from the Trans-New Guinea database. Proto-Trans–New Guinea reconstructions are from Andrew Pawley and Harald Hammarström (2018). ! gloss !! Proto-Madang !! Proto-Trans–New Guinea ! head ! hair ! ear ! eye ! nose ! tooth ! tongue ! leg ! louse ! bird ! egg ! blood ! bone ! skin ! breast ! tree ! woman ! sky ! sun ! moon ! water ! fire ! stone ! name ! eat ! one ! two

CLDF Dataset