The Kowiai language is spoken by a small Muslim community which is located in the southern coastal part of the Bomberai peninsula in West Papua. The kerajaan of Kowiai held trading relationships with the eastern islands of the Ceram sea, and was one of the early outposts of Islam and Malay-influenced culture in West Papua.
The classification of Kowiai as an Austronesian language is obvious, but the only attempt for a narrower classification within Austronesian was made by Blust (1993), who groups Kowiai as an isolate within his Central Malayo-Polynesian subgroup. Here, I will take a first glimpse at qualitative evidence for the closer genetic affiliations of Kowiai.
The closest relative of Kowiai is the Geser language of Eastern Seram, and at the next higher level Watubela, which has been shown by Collins (1986) to be closely related to Geser. Kowiai is thus part of the "Seran Laut" microgroup, as it is called by Collins.
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