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Engan languages

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Engan languages

The Engan languages, or more precisely Enga–Kewa–Huli or Enga – Southern Highland, are a small family of Papuan languages of the highlands of Papua New Guinea. The two branches of the family are rather distantly related, but were connected by Franklin and Voorhoeve (1973).

The name "Engan" is often restricted to the northern branch of the family, to those languages transparently related to Enga, but also sometimes to the family as a whole.

The languages fall into three quite distinct branches: Engan proper, Huli, and Southern Highlands:

The Engan family constitutes a branch of the Trans–New Guinea languages in the classifications of Wurm and of Malcolm Ross, but the evidence for this is weak.

Usher links the Engan and Chimbu languages in a Central New Guinea Highlands family.

There are a considerable number of resemblances with Wiru. Borrowing has not been ruled out as the reason for this, though the pronouns are similar as well.

Usher (2020) reconstructs the consonant inventory as follows:

Vowels are *i *e *a *o *u.

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