The South Bird's Head or South Doberai languages are three families of Papuan languages. They form part of the Trans–New Guinea languages in the classifications of Malcolm Ross (2005) and Timothy Usher (2020), though Pawley and Hammarström (2018) do not consider them to be part of Trans–New Guinea.^[1] However, according to Dryer (2022), based on a preliminary quantitative analysis of data from the ASJP database, South Bird's Head languages are likely to be a subgroup of Trans–New Guinea.^[2]

The languages are as follows,^[3][4][1]

Noting low cognacy rates, Holton and Klamer (2018) tentatively consider the following three language groups to each be independent language families, pending further evidence.^[5]

• Konda–Yahadian
• Inanwatan–Duriankere
• Nuclear South Bird's Head

Usher classifies the South Bird's Head languages as part of a wider Berau Gulf branch of Trans–New Guinea.^[3]

The pronouns are:

3sg *ni is reconstructable for SBH proper. There appears to be both a plural vowel change from *a to *i, as in proto-TNG, and a plural suffix *-ri.

Below are cognates in Nuclear South Bird's Head languages (Arandai, Kokoda, Kemberano, Kaburi, Kais, Puragi) demonstrating their relatedness, as listed by Holton & Klamer (2018):^[5]

South Bird's Head basic vocabulary quoted by Holton & Klamer (2018)^[5] from de Vries (2004), showing diverse non-cognate vocabulary across different language groups:^[6]

Except for the outlier languages Konda and Yahadian, all South Bird's Head languages have nouns classified according to masculine and feminine genders, which are determined with final vowel quality.^[5] West Bird's Head languages also mark nouns for gender.

Unlike many other languages of the Bird's Head Peninsula which display SVO word order (such as Abun, Mpur, Maibrat, West Bird's Head, and others), the South Bird's Head languages have SOV word order.^{[5]: 588–590}

• Berry, Keith; Berry, Christine (1987). "A survey of the South Bird's Head Stock". Workpapers in Indonesian Languages and Cultures. 4: 81–117.
• Cowan, H. K. J. 1953. Voorlopige Resultaten van een Ambtelijk Taalonderzoek in Nieuw-Guinea [Tentative Results of a Governmental Linguistic Study in New Guinea]. ’S-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff.
• Galis, Klaas Wilhelm. 1955. Talen en dialecten van Nederlands Nieuw-Guinea [Languages and dialects of Netherlands New Guinea]. Tijdschrift Nieuw-Guinea 16: 109–118, 134–145, 161–178.
• Smits, Leo and Clemens L. Voorhoeve. 1998. The J.C. Anceaux Collection of Wordlists of Irian Jaya Languages B: Non-Austronesian (Papuan) languages (Part II). Leiden-Jakarta: Department of Cultures and Languages of Southeast Asia and Oceania.