Kalamang, sometimes also called Karas, is a divergent Trans–New Guinea language spoken on the biggest of the Karas Islands off the Bomberai Peninsula, that appears to be most closely related to the West Bomberai languages. It is spoken in Antalisa and Mas villages on Karas Island.^[2]

Quick Facts Region, Native speakers ...

Kalamang
Region	West Papua
Native speakers	100 (2000)[1]
Language family	Trans–New Guinea Berau Gulf West Bomberai Kalamang
Language codes
ISO 639-3	kgv
Glottolog	kara1499
ELP	Karas
Karas is classified as Severely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
Kalamang Show map of Western New Guinea Kalamang Show map of Indonesia Kalamang Show map of Southeast Asia
Coordinates: 3.47°S 132.68°E / -3.47; 132.68

Close

• The consonants /f/ and /h/ are marginal.

• The vowels /a e i/ are reduced to [ə] in unstressed syllables in fast or casual speech.

Additionally, the following diphthongs are present: /ei/, /oi/, /ou/, /ui/.

Cowan (1953) records the following pronouns for Karas.

Visser (2020) records the following pronouns for Karas of Maas village:

The free possessives and possessive suffixes can occur together.^[4]

In 2023, Kalamang was used by machine learning researchers for a benchmark called "Machine Translation from One Book". It was chosen because of its negligible presence in the Internet and because field research materials were collected by Eline Visser, who published "A grammar of Kalamang" as her PhD thesis. Although Kalamang is primarily oral language, it can be written in latin script as the Indonesian language. Researchers used all existing materials (grammar book, short dictionary, and small set of Kalamang-English sentences) to test how large language models (LLM) can learn a language from a single source, and tested the quality of translations.^[5] In 2024, researchers from Google showed that their latest LLM, Gemini 1.5, can translate Kalamang as a human given the same sources.^[6]