A group of over 700 languages of New Guinea and adjacent parts of eastern Indonesia and Melanesia. Today these languages are spoken by about 2.9 million people, and the family is perhaps the most diverse in the world. The Papuan languages presumably descend from the languages of the first settlers of Melanesia c 30-40,000 years ago, and some linguists claim to be able to trace population expansion and migrations within the New Guinea region from about 15,000 years ago.