Taiap language
Encyclopedia
Taiap is an endangered
language isolate
spoken by around a hundred people in the East Sepik Province
of Papua New Guinea
. It is being replaced by the national language and lingua franca
Tok Pisin
.
The first European to come across Taiap was a German missionary in 1938. The language was not studied by linguists until the 1970s due to the inaccessibility of the region. Although Donald Laycock (1973) placed Taiap in his Sepik Ramu language family
, its structure and vocabulary would be unique for that family, and Ross (2005) found no evidence that it is related to any language of New Guinea. The current extent of Taiap is nearly coincident with what had been an offshore island 6000 years ago (map), consistent with the idea that Taiap is a language isolate.
Endangered language
An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use. If it loses all its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all it becomes an "extinct language"....
language isolate
Language isolate
A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. They are in effect language families consisting of a single...
spoken by around a hundred people in the East Sepik Province
East Sepik
East Sepik is a province in Papua New Guinea. Its capital is Wewak. East Sepik has an estimated population of 343,180 people and is roughly 42,800 km square in size.-History:...
of Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea , officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is a country in Oceania, occupying the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and numerous offshore islands...
. It is being replaced by the national language and lingua franca
Lingua franca
A lingua franca is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both mother tongues.-Characteristics:"Lingua franca" is a functionally defined term, independent of the linguistic...
Tok Pisin
Tok Pisin
Tok Pisin is a creole spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. It is an official language of Papua New Guinea and the most widely used language in that country...
.
The first European to come across Taiap was a German missionary in 1938. The language was not studied by linguists until the 1970s due to the inaccessibility of the region. Although Donald Laycock (1973) placed Taiap in his Sepik Ramu language 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...
, its structure and vocabulary would be unique for that family, and Ross (2005) found no evidence that it is related to any language of New Guinea. The current extent of Taiap is nearly coincident with what had been an offshore island 6000 years ago (map), consistent with the idea that Taiap is a language isolate.