The West Papuan languages are a proposed language family of about two dozen non-Austronesian languages of the Bird's Head Peninsula (Vogelkop or Doberai Peninsula) of far western New Guinea, the island of Halmahera and its vicinity, spoken by about 220,000 people in all. It is not established if they constitute a proper linguistic family or an areal network of genetically unrelated families.

The best known "West Papuan" language is Ternate (50,000 native speakers) of the island of the same name. Along with neighboring Tidore, they are the languages of the rival Ternate and Tidore sultanates, famous for their role in the spice trade.

The North Halmahera (NH) languages, spoken in the Maluku Islands, share some structural similarities with certain Papuan families in Melanesia, which was noted as far back as 1900. In addition, there is a number of lexical and morphemic correspondences between NH and West Bird’s Head (WBH). These are not easily explainable as chance resemblance. The question then is whether they are due to language contact (i.e., borrowing) or to common descent (i.e., genealogical inheritance). On the other hand, there is little evidence linking the individual families of the Vogelkop Peninsula to each other, with the relationship perhaps better considered areal (i.e., a Sprachbund). In spite of the shared morpho-syntactic features, many of these languages exhibit little in the way of lexical resemblance.

It is not clear if East Bird’s Head (Mantion–Meyah and Hatam–Mansim), Maybrat, Mpur, and Abun are related to any of the remaining groups. However, a connection between WBH/NH and the Yawa languages appears to be relatively likely. The South Bird’s Head and Timor–Alor–Pantar families, while included in older formulations of the proposal, are no longer thought of as part of West Papuan.

All of these languages show traces of old Austronesian influence. Much of the basic vocabulary in NH (~30%) can be linked with various Austronesian sources, suggesting a long period of contact. The languages of the Bird’s Head have undergone extensive contact with the Cenderawasih Bay languages, such as Biak.

The term "West Papuan" has also been used in an areal sense, encompassing most of the non-Austronesian languages of Halmahera and Bird's Head.

The German linguist Wilhelm Schmidt first linked the West Bird's Head and North Halmahera languages in 1900. In 1957 H.K.J. Cowan linked them to the non-Austronesian languages of Timor as well. Stephen Wurm believed that although traces of West Papuan languages were to be found in the languages of Timor, as well as those of Aru and Great Andaman, this was due to a substratum and that these languages should be classified as Trans–New Guinea, Austronesian, and Andamanese, respectively. Indeed, most of the languages of East Nusa Tenggara and Maluku appear to have some non-Austronesian influence.

In 2005, Malcolm Ross made a tentative proposal, based on the forms of their pronouns, that the West Papuan languages form one of three branches of an extended West Papuan family that also includes the Yawa languages, and a newly proposed East Bird's Head – Sentani family as a third branch.