Editing Joseph Greenberg (section)

====The languages of New Guinea, Tasmania, and the Andaman Islands====
{{main|Indo-Pacific languages}}

During 1971 Greenberg proposed the [[Indo-Pacific languages|Indo-Pacific]] [[macrofamily]], which groups together the [[Papuan languages]] (a large number of language families of [[New Guinea]] and nearby islands) with the native languages of the [[Andaman Islands]] and [[Tasmania]] but excludes the [[indigenous Australian languages|Australian Aboriginal languages]]. Its principal feature was to reduce the manifold language families of New Guinea to a single genetic unit. This excludes the [[Austronesian languages]], which have been established as associated with a more recent migration of people.

Greenberg's [[subgrouping (linguistics)|subgrouping]] of these languages has not been accepted by the few specialists who have worked on the classification of these languages.{{citation needed|date=January 2020}} However, the work of [[Stephen Wurm]] (1982) and [[Malcolm Ross (linguist)|Malcolm Ross]] (2005) has provided considerable evidence for his once-radical idea that these languages form a single genetic unit. Wurm stated that the lexical similarities between [[Great Andamanese]] and the West Papuan and Timor–Alor families "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity [...] in a number of instances." He believes this to be due to a [[linguistic substratum]].