| Papuan Malay | |
|---|---|
| Irian Malay | |
| Native to | Indonesia |
| Region | Western New Guinea |
Native speakers | unknown; 500,000 combined L1 and L2 speakers (2007)[1] |
Malay Creole
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | pmy |
| Glottolog | papu1250 |
Papuan Malay or Irian Malay is a Malay-based creole language spoken in the Indonesian part of New Guinea. It emerged as a contact language among tribes in Indonesian New Guinea (now Papua, Central Papua, Highland Papua, South Papua, West Papua, and Southwest Papua) for trading and daily communication. Nowadays, it has a growing number of native speakers. More recently, the vernacular of Indonesian Papuans has been influenced by Standard Indonesian, the national standard dialect. It is spoken in Indonesian New Guinea alongside 274 other languages[2] and functions as a lingua franca.
Papuan Malay belongs to the Malayic sub-branch within the Western-Malayo-Polynesian (WMP) branch of the Austronesian language family.[3]
Some linguists have suggested that Papuan Malay has its roots in North Moluccan Malay, as evidenced by the number of Ternate loanwords in its lexicon.[4] Others have proposed that it is derived from Ambonese Malay.[5]
Four varieties of Papuan Malay can be identified.[5]
- ^ Papuan Malay at Ethnologue (21st ed., 2018)
- ^ Kluge 2014, p. 2.
- ^ Kluge 2014, p. 16.
- ^ Allen, Robert B.; Hayami-Allen, Rika (2002). "Orientation in the Spice Islands". In Macken, M. (ed.). Papers from the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (PDF). Tempe, AZ: Program for Southeast Asian Studies, Arizona State University. p. 21. ISBN 1-881044-29-7. OCLC 50506465. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2022-12-25.
- ^ a b Kluge (2017), pp. 11, 47
