| Huon | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution | Huon Peninsula,Papua New Guinea |
| Linguistic classification | Trans–New Guinea
|
| Subdivisions |
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| Language codes | |
| Glottolog | huon1246 |
TheHuon languages are alanguage family, spoken on theHuon Peninsula of Papua New Guinea, that was classified within the originalTrans–New Guinea (TNG) proposal, andWilliam A. Foley considers their TNG identity to be established. They share with theFinisterre 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.
Huon and Finisterre, and the connection between them, were identified byKenneth McElhanon (1967, 1970). They are clearly valid language families. Huon contains two clear branches, Eastern and Western. The Western languages allow more consonants in syllable-final position (p, t, k, m, n, ŋ), while the Eastern languages have neutralized those distinctions to two, the glottal stop (writtenc) and the velar nasal (McElhanon 1974: 17). Beyond that, classification is based onlexicostatistics, which provides less precise classification results.
Kâte is the locallingua franca.