Bel (language family)
Bel is the name of a group of Austronesian languages in the Madang Province of Papua New Guinea . Occasionally the language otherwise known as Gedaged is also referred to as Bel. The Bel languages belong to the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of the Austronesian language family.
Languages belonging to the Bel group (information on the number of speakers):
- Takia , 20,000 speakers in the southern half of Karkar , Bagabag and some coastal villages in Madang province
- Marik , 3,500 speakers in ten villages in the Madang district on the Gogol River
- Gedaged , 2,764 speakers in Astrolabe Bay and coastal villages around Madang. Gedaged, also known as Bel, has significance as the church language of today's Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea beyond the circle of native speakers.
- Other languages with less than a thousand speakers are Bilbil, Matukar, Mindiri, Awad Bing and Wab .
Language code according to ISO 639-2: map. It is a common language code under which several Austronesian languages are grouped together.
Almost all of Bel-speakers speak at least the official language Tok Pisin fluently.
Possibly due to the close contact with neighboring speakers of Papua languages , the sentence structure of the Bel languages has changed from the subject-verb-object (SVO) to the subject-object-verb sequence (SOV), which is common for other languages of the language family. changed.
Individual evidence
- ^ Ethnologue, Languages of the World . Ethnologue.com. Retrieved July 7, 2010.