Dagan

Dagan, also called the Meneao Range languages, is a small family of the Southeast Papuan branch of the Trans-New Guinea phylum, spoken in the Meneao Range on the Bird's Tail, the southeastern peninsula of New Guinea. These are the easternmost Papuan, or non-Austronesian, languages on the New Guinea mainland.

Its members include Daga, also known as Dimuga, Maiwa, Ginuman and Umanakaina, spoken by mountain villages split between the Milne Bay and Central districts. The kinship between them is loose: Ginuman and Umanakaina share only about a quarter of their vocabulary.

When the Spanish navigator Yñigo Ortiz de Retez coined the name New Guinea in 1545, and when Torres sailed the island's southern waters in 1606, these remote inland valleys remained beyond the reach of the coastal expeditions.