The Alor-Pantar languages: History and typology

• Main Author: Klamer, Marian (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Language Science Press 2014
• Subjects: Papuan languages; linguistics; elevationals; alor-pantar languages; comparative linguistics; papuan languages; typology; numeral systems; Abui language; Adang language; Alor-Pantar languages; Blagar language; Parallel and cross cousins; Teiwa language; Wersing language; Western Pantar language; Woisika language
• Online Access: DOAB: download the publication; DOAB: description of the publication

The Alor-Pantar family constitutes the westernmost outlier group of Papuan (Non-Austronesian) languages. Its twenty or so languages are spoken on the islands of Alor and Pantar, located just north of Timor, in eastern In- donesia. Together with the Papuan languages of Timor, they make up the Timor-Alor-Pantar family. The languages average 5,000 speakers and are under pressure from the local Malay variety as well as the national lan- guage, Indonesian. This volume studies the internal and external linguistic history of this interesting group, and showcases some of its unique typological features, such as the preference to index the transitive patient-like argument on the verb but not the agent-like one; the extreme variety in morphologi- cal alignment patterns; the use of plural number words; the existence of quinary numeral systems; the elaborate spatial deictic systems involving an elevation component; and the great variation exhibited in their kinship systems. Unlike many other Papuan languages, Alor-Pantar languages do not ex- hibit clause-chaining, do not have switch reference systems, never suffix subject indexes to verbs, do not mark gender, but do encode clusivity in their pronominal systems. Indeed, apart from a broadly similar head-final syntactic profile, there is little else that the Alor-Pantar languages share with Papuan languages spoken in other regions. While all of them show some traces of contact with Austronesian languages, in general, borrow- ing from Austronesian has not been intense, and contact with Malay and Indonesian is a relatively recent phenomenon in most of the Alor-Pantar region.