The land of Papua is indeed famous for its cultural diversity, including the languages. There are around 428 regional languages that exist on the western side of Papua. That makes them become the most diverse language speakers in Indonesia. For example, in West Papua which has the Baham language.
Baham is definitely one of the regional languages of Papua, to be precise, West Papua Province. This language has an interesting history. Starting from where this language is spoken, who are the speakers, and how it differs from other languages. There is also an interesting story about its origin.
So, here are all the things you should know about the language of Baham!
The Places Where the Language of Baham is Spoken
Just like other languages in Papua, the use of the Baham language is indeed limited to only certain areas. Usually, people use it in one or two villages only. In this case, the people who use it are villagers that live in the Kotam Village. To be precise, it is located in East Fakfak District, Fakfak Regency, West Papua.
However, aside from that, there are also the people from Kokas District who speak this language. Then, some people from Kaimana District in Kaimana Regency also know how to speak the language of Baham. But, the main speakers are indeed in the Kotam Village.
The villagers, in the eastern part of Kotam Village also speak the language of Baham. While in the west, north, and south, the villagers use the Iha language in their daily life.
Because its use is limited to only certain areas, the villagers of Kotam communicate with outsiders by using other languages. The most common one is probably Papuan Malay. However, they also often speak the Indonesian language.
The Speakers of the Language of Baham
Then, who are the speakers of the Baham language? There are many people who are probably curious about that. Unfortunately, there are no official records stating what tribe or ethnic group can speak this language. But, it is obviously one of the tribes that exist in the Fakfak and the Kaimana Regencies.
According to the latest available records that exist in 1987, there were around 1,100 Baham language speakers. However, it is not clear if that number increases or vice versa. There is no recent data about the number of speakers of the language of Baham.
The Differences between the Language of Baham with Any Other Languages
Based on dialect metric calculations, experts conclude that Baham is a language and not just a dialect. This is because the percentage of its lexical and phonological differences with other languages is quite high. It is 96,75% with Uruangniring, 99,25% with Sabakor, and then 99,5% with Kamberau.
In general, there are two major language families in Papua, that is the Papuan languages and Austronesian. Many people also know the Papuan family languages as the languages of Trans-New Guinea. The language of Baham is included here along with many other regional languages that exist in Papua.
Although the distribution is only around New Guinea Island and the small islands around it, this has a large variety of languages. When it comes to a number of languages, the Papuan family languages occupy the third ranking overall. It is right after the Niger-Congo family languages and Austronesian.
The total number of languages included in this family is 482. That is around 6.8% of the total languages in the world. Within the language family, there are several subgroups that are classified based on phylogenesis.
The Baham language itself belongs to the West Bomberai Sejati subgroup language. Even though there are not many speakers of the language of Baham, the preservation of this regional language of West Papua must be maintained.
