Biksi-Yetfa language

Biksi-Yetfa
Biksi
Native to	Indonesia, Papua New Guinea
Region	West Papua
Ethnicity	Yetfa, Biksi
Native speakers	1,000 (1996)[1]
Language family	Sepik? Biksi-Yetfa
Dialects	Yetfa Biksi
Language codes
ISO 639-3	yet
Glottolog	yetf1238[2]

Yetfa and Biksi (Biaksi) are dialects of a language spoken in West Papua, Indonesia, and across the border in Papua New Guinea. It's a trade language in West Papua up to the PNG border.

The language is not close to others. Ross (2005), following Laycock & Z’Graggen (1975), places Biksi in its own branch of the Sepik family, but there is little data to base a classification on. The similarities noted by Laycock are sporadic and may simply be loans; Ross based his classification on pronouns, but they are dissimilar enough for the connection to be uncertain. According to Hammarström (2008), it's being passed on to children and is not in immediate danger.

Pronouns

I	nyo	we	nana
thou	pwo	you	so
s/he	do	they	dwa

References

1. Biksi-Yetfa at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Yetfa". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.