Gender Vocalism in the South Bird’s Head Languages in Comparative Perspective

This article reconstructs the gender vocalics of the South Bird’s Head family and compares them with those reconstructed for two other Trans New Guinea families, Anim and Ok. Although chance cannot be convincingly ruled out, the close correspondences between the gender vocalics of the Proto-South Bird’s Head family and those of Proto-Anim and Proto-Ok suggest the possibility of a shared innovation that replaced the third singular pronoun *[y]a/ *ua of Proto-Trans New Guinea by two gendered demonstrative pronouns, *e ‘that. M’ and *u ‘that. F’. The demonstrative vocalics formed the starting point for grammaticalization processes that resulted in similar systems of elaborate gender vocalism in the three families.