Yapen Island in Cenderawasih Bay, Indonesia, is home to a small group of closely related Papuan languages: the Yawa-Saweru languages. Up until now, the Yawa-Saweru languages have remained largely undescribed and there is no scholarly consensus on the genetic affiliations of the family. Even though multiple attempts at establishing genetic relationships have been made, such hypotheses cannot be properly evaluated without detailed descriptions of the language family and rigorous bottom-up reconstruction.
This thesis addresses this issue by providing the necessary descriptive and reconstructive foundation. It first describes aspects of the phonology, morphology and syntax of three distinct varieties of Yawa-Saweru. It then applies the comparative method to these descriptions and reconstruct aspects of the phonology, lexicon and morphosyntax of the shared ancestor of the Yawa-Saweru varieties, Proto-Yawa-Saweru.
The descriptions in this work extend our knowledge of the typological diversity in Cenderawasih Bay and on Yapen Island significantly. Throughout this work, it becomes clear that the Yawa-Saweru varieties have diversified rapidly into highly distinct varieties, perhaps due to intense Papuan-Austronesian language contact in the past and, more recently, to language shift to Papuan Malay. The reconstructions presented in this thesis may open new avenues for determining the genetic affiliations of Yawa-Saweru and contribute to a better understanding of the complex linguistic history of the New Guinea region.
