The Kalam languages are a small family

Language family

A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...

 of languages in the Madang

Madang languages

The Madang or Madang–Adelbert Range languages are the largest family of Trans–New Guinea languages in the classification of Malcolm Ross. William Foley concurs that it is "highly likely" that the Madang languages are part of TNG. The family is named after Madang Province and the Adelbert...

 branch of the Trans–New Guinea languages (TNG) phylum of New Guinea.

The languages are:

Gants, Kalam–Kobon

Kobon language

-Geographic distribution:Kobon is spoken in Madang Province and Western Highlands Province, north of Mount Hagen.-Vowels:Vowels are . and may be and word-initially...

, Abaga

Abaga language

Abaga is a nearly extinct Kalam language of Papua New Guinea. It had once been classified as Finisterre....

, Tai.

They are famous for having perhaps the smallest numbers of lexical verbs of any languages in the world, with somewhere in the range of 100 to 120 verbs in the case of Kobon.

Ross classifies the Rai Coast languages

Rai Coast languages

The Rai Coast languages are a family of languages in the Madang branch of the Trans–New Guinea languages phylum of New Guinea.Sidney Herbert Ray identified what was then known of the Rai Coast languages as a unit in 1919. They were linked with the Mabuso languages in 1951 by Arthur Capell in his...

as the closest relatives of Kalam, but suggests that Kalam may actually be part of that family.