Ramu

The Ramu languages are a family of about thirty Papuan tongues spoken along the Ramu River and neighbouring waterways of the Sepik–Ramu basin in northern Papua New Guinea. For millennia its villages drew food, transport and their way of life from the river.

Classifiers commonly join the family with the Lower Sepik languages in a wider Ramu–Lower Sepik grouping. Its branches include the Ottilien family and the lexically divergent Grass languages, of which Banaro shares remarkably few cognates with the rest of Ramu speech.

European ships first reached this coast in 1827, when Dumont d'Urville charted the nearby Astrolabe Bay, while the Ramu villages themselves stayed beyond outside reach for decades longer.