Social network analysis is applied to three data sets collected from villages
speaking languages of the Nambu Sub-Family in Papua New Guinea: reported speech
similarity, bride exchanges, and basic vocabulary similarity. The bride exchange data
led to substantially the same conclusions as the sociolinguistic data, supporting the
proposition that sociolinguistic community structures are revealed in non-linguistic social
data as well as they are in linguistic data. Furthermore, the proposition that the analysis
of social networks will reveal groups of actors who will work well together in language
development activities was supported by correspondence between this analysis and the
activities of participants at the 2002 Morehead Alphabet Development Workshop.
Additionally, analysis of the bride exchange data provided evidence, which the reported
and measured linguistic data did not, that the Tonda Sub-Family of languages should also
be included in a common language development program with the Nambu Sub-Family of
languages.