Overview

What can the languages spoken today tell us about the history of their speakers? This question is crucial in insular Southeast Asia and New Guinea, where thousands of languages are spoken, but written historical records and archaeological evidence is yet lacking in most regions. While the region has a long history of contact through trade, marriage exchanges, and cultural-political dominance, detailed linguistic studies of the effects of such contacts remain limited. This volume investigates how loanwords can prove past contact events, taking into consideration ten different regions located in the Philippines, Eastern Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and New Guinea. Each chapter studies borrowing across the borders of language families, and discusses implications for the social history of the speech communities.

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Marian Klamer is Professor of Austronesian and Papuan Linguistics at Leiden University. She has published on a wide range of topics, including morphology, typology, grammaticalization, language contact, and historical reconstruction. Klamer is the author of (sketch) grammars of two Austronesian languages (Kambera, 1998, Alorese, 2011) and three Papuan languages (Teiwa, 2010, Kaera, 2014, and Sentani, in prep.), as well as a number of edited volumes. Over the years, Klamer has led a range of research projects studying the grammatical variety and contact-induced change in Austronesian and Papuan languages spoken by small-scale communities in eastern Indonesia. Francesca R. Moro is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Insubria in Como, Italy. In 2016 she completed her PhD at Radboud University Nijmegen on Ambon Malay spoken as heritage language in the Netherlands. From 2015 to 2019 she joined the NWO Vici Research Project Reconstructing the past through languages of the present: the Lesser Sunda Islands at Leiden University, where she investigated contact-induced language change in Alorese, an Austronesian language surrounded by Papuan languages. Moro has published articles on contact phenomena between Ambon Malay and Dutch, as well as between Alorese and its Papuan neighbours in the International Journal of Bilingualism, Oceanic Linguistics, and the Journal of Language Contact. Since 2020 she teaches second language acquisition and heritage linguistics at University of Insubria, and does research on Filipino as heritage language in Italy.

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