Northern Adelbert languages

The Northern Adelbert or Pihom–Isumrud languages are a family of twenty languages in the Madang stock of New Guinea. The occupy the coastal northern Adelbert Range of mountains directly opposite Karkar Island, as opposed to the Southern Adelbert languages, another branch of Madang.

Malcolm Ross posited a "linkage" connecting the Northern Adelbert languages with the Mabuso languages, and named this group Croisilles /krɔɪˈsɪlz/, as the two families bracket Cape Croisilles (Northern Adelbert to the north, Mabuso to the south). However, Ross never claimed Croisilles was an actual language family, and other researchers have rejected the connection.

There are approximately 20 Northern Adelbert languages.

Below is a comparison of Northern Adelbert language names in Pick (2020) and Z'graggen (1980). A few alternate names from Capell (1952) are also given.

Croisilles was first posited by Malcolm Ross (1995), not as an actual language family, but as a linkage. It was a merger of Wurm's Pihom-Isumrud-Mugil and Mabuso stocks, each of which contained 25–30 languages. Pick (2017, 2020) and Usher reject the merger, and provisionally the inclusion of Mugil (Bargam), though Pick retains the name. Usher disambiguates the (non-Mabuso) family as 'Adelbert Range'.

Timothy Usher classifies the languages as follows.

Below is Andrew Pick's (2020) classification of the Northern Adelbert languages.

A quite similar internal classification was worked out independently by Pick (2017). Pick could not establish regular sound correspondences with Kobol–Pal (Omosan) or Amaimon (Mabulap), and thus leaves them out of the family.