Qaqet (Kakat, Makakat, Maqaqet), or Baining, is a non-Austronesian language from the Baining family spoken in East New Britain Province on the island of New Britain, Papua New Guinea. Overview Qaqet is spoken by some 15,000 people in the Gazelle Peninsula in the East New Britain Province of Papua New Guinea. Historically, the Qaqet used to lead highly mobile lives, subsisting of horticulture and hunting. Rather recently, colonial administrators have created permanent settlements. Today, villages with major Qaqet-speaking populations are: Raunsepna () in Inland Baining Rural LLG Kamanakam () in Inland Baining Rural LLG Walmetki () in Lassul Baining Rural LLG Raunsepna is located in the mountainous interior, while the other two villages are located near the coast. Raunsepna's relative remoteness has implications for Qaqet's sociolinguistic status: as there are few outsiders there, Qaqet remains the dominant language in everyday life, and children acquire it as their first language. Kamanakam, by contrast, has seen an influx of settlers from adjacent ethnic groups, making inter-ethnic marriages common. This has resulted in Tok Pisin becoming the dominant language of that village. Classification Qaqet belongs to the small Baining family, hence being a so-called Papuan language. The term Papuan is an umbrella classification that describes languages native to New Guinea and surrounding islands which are not part of the Austronesian language family. The other members of the Baining family are Mali, Qairaq, Simbali, Ura, and possibly Makolkol. Makolkol is probably extinct, and the information available for it is insufficient for determining its genetic affiliation. The Baining languages are grouped with the other non-Austronesian languages of the region into the East Papuan Languages. However, despite attempts at establishing East Papuan as a genetic unit, the grouping remains purely geographical. Attempts at establishing relationships with neighbouring Papuan languages, such as Taulil or Butam, have so far not been successful. Phonology Qaqet has a moderately small phoneme inventory consisting of 16 consonantal and 4 vowel phonemes. The orthography used here follows Hellwig (2019), which is in turn based on the orthography developed by Parker & Parker (1974). Where different from the IPA notation, the orthographic representation is given in square brackets. Consonants The voiceless stops /p t k/ are often aspirated word-initially and unreleased word-finally. They have two other predictable allophones: voiced /b d g/ following a nasal, and lenited /v r q/ intervocalically. These last three phonemes probably arose historically out of their stop counterparts