Kiwaian

Kiwaian is a close-knit language family of southern Papua New Guinea, spoken in the deltas of the Fly and Bamu rivers and along the Gulf of Papua, with Kiwai Island and Daru at its heart. Its members differ little enough to read as dialects of one another.

Although their grammar has diverged sharply from neighbouring Trans–New Guinea speech, a stock of shared basic words leads most classifiers to place Kiwaian within that wider family.

The coastal Kiwai were noted seafarers, whose canoes carried their language across the delta and into the Torres Strait, where islanders and Papuan communities had traded for millennia. The first European ships reached those waters in 1606, when the Spanish navigator Luís Vaz de Torres sailed along the southern coast of New Guinea; the strait between New Guinea and Australia was later named after him.