The West Bomberai languages are a family of Papuan languages spoken on the Bomberai Peninsula of western New Guinea and in East Timor and neighboring islands of Indonesia.

This article should specify the language of its non-English content, using {{lang}}, {{transliteration}} for transliterated languages, and {{IPA}} for phonetic transcriptions, with an appropriate ISO 639 code. Wikipedia's multilingual support templates may also be used. (December 2021)

Quick Facts Geographic distribution, Linguistic classification ...

West Bomberai
Bomberai–Timor
Geographic distribution	West New Guinea, East Timor
Linguistic classification	Trans–New Guinea Berau Gulf West Bomberai
Subdivisions	Karas Mbahaam–Iha Timor–Alor–Pantar
Glottolog	west2604  (mainland West Bomberai) timo1261  (Timor–Alor–Pantar)
Map: The West Bomberai languages of New Guinea   The West Bomberai languages   Other Trans–New Guinea languages   Other Papuan languages   Austronesian languages   Uninhabited

Close

Two of the languages of the mainland, Baham and Iha, are closely related to each other; the third is distant, forming a third branch of the family along with the Timor–Alor–Pantar languages:^[1]

• Mbahaam–Iha: Baham (Mbaham), Iha
• Karas
• Timor–Alor–Pantar

Ross (2005) classified Timor–Alor–Pantar with the mainland West Bomberai languages, although this connection is not universally accepted. Usher found that the Timor–Alor–Pantar languages resides within the West Bomberai languages, and is not just their closest relative. This suggests that Timor–Alor–Pantar may have been the result of a relatively recent migration from New Guinea, perhaps arriving in the Timor area shortly before the Austronesian languages did.

Ross (2005) classifies Timor–Alor–Pantar with the West Bomberai languages, the two groups forming a branch within West Trans–New Guinea. Based on a careful examination of new lexical data, Holton & Robinson (2014) find little evidence to support a connection between TAP and TNG.^[2] However, Holton & Robinson (2017) concede that a relationship with Trans-New Guinea and West Bomberai in particular is the most likely hypothesis, though they prefer to leave it unclassified for now.^[3] Usher (2020) finds that the two mainland branches of the family are no closer to each other than they are to the Timor–Alor–Pantar languages, and has begun to reconstruct the West Bomberai protolanguage.^[1]

Usher (2020) reconstructs the consonant and vowel inventories as:^[1]

Prenasalized plosives do not occur initially, having merged with the voiceless plosives.

The vowels are *i *u *e *o *a *ɒ and the diphthong *ai.

Usher (2020) reconstructs the free pronouns as:^[1]

Protoforms of the 40 most-stable items^[4] in the Swadesh list include the following.^[1]

The following basic vocabulary words are from Voorhoeve (1975),^[5] as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database:^[6]

The following lexical data comparing West Bomberai with other languages of the Bomberai Peninsula and Geelvink Bay is from the Trans-New Guinea database^[7] and Usher (2020),^[8] unless noted otherwise.