Kalam languages

The Kalam languages are a small family of languages in the Madang subgroup of Papua New Guinea.^[1] The languages that make up the family are Kalam, Tai, and Kobon.

Kalam
Kaironk River
Geographic distribution	Papua New Guinea
Linguistic classification	Northeast New Guinea? Madang Kalam
Language codes
Glottolog	kala1404

They are famous for having perhaps the smallest numbers of lexical verbs of any languages in the world, with somewhere in the range of 100 to 120 verbs in the case of Kobon.

It is as yet unclear whether the Gants language is most closely related to the Kalam languages or is one of the Sogeram languages.

References

1. Winslow, John H. (1977). The Melanesian Environment. Australian National University Press. pp. 62–64. ISBN 978-0-7081-0824-6.

Further notes

• Pawley, Andrew; Bulmer, Ralph (2011). A dictionary of Kalam with ethnographic notes. The Australian National University. OCLC 750403478.