Madang

The Madang or Madang–Adelbert Range languages form a large family within the Trans–New Guinea phylum, spread across Madang Province on Papua New Guinea's north coast, from Astrolabe Bay and Karkar through the forests of the Adelbert Range. Its two principal branches are the Mabuso languages and the Rai Coast languages; the family's internal diversity is so great that its time depth has been compared to that of Austronesian or Indo-European.

Unusually for Trans–New Guinea groups, the inherited pronouns have been replaced, so that evidence for the family rests on shared words such as the reconstructed proto-Madang term for water.

The natural harbour of Astrolabe Bay, around which many villages speaking these languages stand, was first entered by Europeans in 1827, when the French explorer Dumont d'Urville named it after his corvette, the Astrolabe.