The Mailuan or Cloudy Bay languages are a small family of Trans–New Guinea languages spoken around Cloudy Bay in the "Bird's Tail" (southeastern peninsula) of New Guinea.
Dutton (1971) said Bauwaki was a link to the Yareban languages.
It has greater lexical similarity with Aneme Wake (Yareban) than the closest Mailuan language, Domu.
Usher (2020) reconstructs the proto-Mailuan–Yareban pronouns as:[1] Ross (1995) reconstructs the Mailuan pronouns as: The following basic vocabulary words are from Thomson (1975)[2] and various SIL field notes, as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database.
[3] The words cited constitute translation equivalents, whether they are cognate (e.g. kuma, uma, tuma for “louse”) or not (e.g. baka, ulim, muruu for “egg”).