Trans-New Guinea

The Trans-New Guinea family is the great family of Papuan languages, spread across New Guinea and neighbouring islands from the Bomberai Peninsula to the Huon Peninsula, with outliers on Timor, Alor and Pantar. With several hundred languages it may be the world's third-largest family, though its outer membership remains debated while its highland core is well established. Shared verbal object prefixes are the strongest evidence linking them.

Their speakers are heirs to one of the independent origins of agriculture: drainage works and taro cultivation in the Wahgi valley's Kuk Swamp go back some 9000 years, with bananas and sugarcane grown there by 6500 years ago.

Austronesian seafarers settled the coasts roughly 3500 years ago, beginning millennia of contact between the two traditions, and Spanish explorers gave New Guinea its name in 1545.