Austronesian · Malayo-Polynesian
Biga
Nearest relatives
- Deepest shared ancestor
- Waigeo Maya
- 3 other languages on this map
All equally close. Glottolog’s classification is a nesting without branch lengths, so this list cannot be ordered by how closely related its members are.
Measured between recorded points, not between speaker areas. Glottolog’s coordinate is frequently the midpoint of a dispersed population, so this is an order of magnitude rather than a survey.
Computed only among the 726 languages mapped here. A language whose family mostly lives outside Indonesia may have a nearer relative off this map.
Up the family tree
Each step up adds relatives and widens the ground they cover. Click a step to see it light up on the map.
| Level | Languages | Languages | Spans |
|---|---|---|---|
| Biga | the language itself | ||
| Waigeo Maya | 4 | 200 km | |
| Raja Ampat Maya | 5 | 200 km | |
| Maya-Salawati | 7 | 200 km | |
| Maya-Salawati-Matbat | 8 | 200 km | |
| Raja Ampat-South Halmahera | 17 | 490 km | |
| South Halmahera-West New Guinea | 42 | 1,200 km | |
| Eastern Malayo-Polynesian | 56 | 1,510 km | |
| Malayo-Polynesian | 464 | 5,010 km | |
| Austronesian | 464 | 5,010 km |
Bar length: languages on this map, on a log scale from 1 to 464. Spans: the distance between the two furthest recorded points, midpoint to midpoint — a floor, not the true extent.
- Glottocode
- biga1238
- Glottolog’s permanent identifier for this language. Names change, and one name can mean several languages; the code does neither. This whole map is keyed on codes, never on names.
- ISO 639-3
- bhc
- Endangerment status
- shifting
- Glottolog’s AES assessment: an expert judgement of how far speakers have shifted to another language — not a measurement, not a census, and not a speaker count.
- Most extensive description
- Phonology, texts or dictionary
- Per Glottolog: the fullest kind of work ever published on this language.
- References in Glottolog
- 7 bibliography entries See its bibliography on Glottolog
- Coordinates
- 130.2720°E, 1.9957°S
- Territory
- No polygon — drawn as a point. A point stays a point. Glottolog’s coordinate is frequently the midpoint of a dispersed population, so a language without a polygon is drawn as a mark and is never inflated into a territory.
- Alternate names
- No alternate names in the sources used
No speaker count is given. Glottolog carries no reliable figures and proprietary sources are not used. An unsourced number is worse than an absent one.
Sources
- Glottolog 5.3 as CLDF v5.3 · CC-BY-4.0
Hammarström, Harald & Forkel, Robert & Haspelmath, Martin & Bank, Sebastian. 2026. Glottolog 5.3. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- Glottography dataset derived from Asher and Moseley 2007 "Atlas of the World's Languages" v2.0 · CC-BY-4.0
Asher, R. E. & Christopher J. Moseley (eds.) 2007. Atlas of the World's Languages. 2nd edn. Routledge.
- Glottography dataset derived from Schapper 2020 "Introduction to The Papuan languages of Timor, Alor and Pantar. Volume 3" v2.0 · CC-BY-4.0
Schapper, Antoinette. 2020. Introduction to The Papuan languages of Timor, Alor and Pantar. Volume 3. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. doi:10.1515/9781501511158-001.
- Natural Earth vector, 1:10m cultural and physical v5.1.2 · public-domain
Made with Natural Earth. Free vector and raster map data @ naturalearthdata.com. Public domain.
- CLDF dataset derived from Greenhill et al.'s "Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database" v0.1 · CC-BY-4.0
Greenhill, S.J., Blust, R. & Gray, R.D. (2008). The Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database: From Bioinformatics to Lexomics. Evolutionary Bioinformatics, 4:271-283. CLDF edition: lexibank/abvd v0.1.
- Grambank v1.0.3 · CC-BY-4.0
Skirgård, H., Haynie, H.J., Blasi, D.E. et al. (2023). Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss. Science Advances 9(16). Data: grambank/grambank v1.0.3.