CALA 2019 - Paper 10-2 - Southeast Asia: Linguistic Perspectives

1998

Moderna Språk

In this book, Asya Pereltsvaig, lecturer at Stanford University, sets out to give us an overview of the languages of the world and their structural diversity. Basing her description on concrete examples, she gives a typological view of the various language families, mostly, but not always, from a geographic starting point. The text is presented in a pedagogical and student oriented way that suggests great experience, both as a writer and a teacher. After an introduction where she discusses basic concepts like languages, dialects and accents, language families and language diversity the author starts off with a rather short chapter on the Indo-European languages, followed by eight chapters on the linguistic situation in different parts of the world, which give a very good overview of the present-day situation. At the end of each of these chapters she focuses on a specific linguistic question that is relevant to that particular group of languages or to the geo-cultural situation, e.g. 'Lesser known Indo-European Languages', 'Universals and parametric theory of the languages', 'Field linguistics' and 'Language contact'. This is a very good way of keeping the reader's interest. She also successfully avoids a tedious repetitive catalogue description of the geo-linguistic situation of the world by focusing on general typology and on a few representative or enigmatic cases. This way the book should capture the students' (i.e. readers') interest in continuing their reading, thus deepening their knowledge and motivation. The reader is provided with intriguing and motivating questions throughout the book, which show the author's deep knowledge and capacity to synthesize the complex matter into comprehensible résumés. The author has also included some small grey boxes where she discusses specific topics such as 'Knights, riders and false friends', 'Pioneers of the Pacific' and 'Language diversity and density'. The book ends with two chapters on 'macro families' (the idea of nostratic languages and similar "macroviews") and 'pidgins, creoles and other mixed languages'. The book is a truly exhaustive presentation of the languages of the world, focusing on the contemporary situation and the relationships between these languages, not only in terms of forming different "families" but also from a typological standpoint, which makes the reading more interesting and also offers a better scholarly perspective. This way the author is able to introduce the reader into such fields of vital linguistic interest as language contact, field linguistics, universals and the officiality of languages without a long repetitive presentation of all the world's languages but rather focusing on what is representative and characteristic, and this in itself makes the book more valuable as a textbook and as a stimulus. It is obvious that the value and utility of the book increases considerably because of this approach. There is no mistaking the fascination and interest on the part of the author in attempting to systematize and pedagogize such an enormous scholarly field as that

Theory and Practice in Language Studies

The coastal community of Tuban Regency has a distinctive language identity. This language identity becomes a distinguishing element with the surrounding speech community. It appears in the marine lexicon they use. This study aims to examine the linguistic identity by describing (1) the linguistic situation of the community, (2) the marine lexicon, which is their language identity, and (3) the relationship between the lexicon and its socio-cultural conditions in terms of Redfield's theory. The researcher collected data by observation and interviews in an ethnolinguistic framework to achieve this. The results of the study show (1) the linguistic situation of the coastal community of Tuban Regency has Mataraman Javanese as their mother tongue but is interfered with Arek Javanese and Madurese languages. (2) The naming of fish, ship parts, fishing equipment and fishing activities becomes a marine lexicon as a marker of the language identity of the speech community. (3) The marine lex...

The Mainland Southeast Asia Linguistic Area

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements in Ling 135 Contrastive Analysis of English

English Review: Journal of English Education

This study examines the kinship of the Malay language and the Malagasy language. These two languages come from the same proto language, namely Proto Austronesian (PAN). Departing from the researchers’ assumptions about the linguistic relationship both at the phoneme and morpheme levels, there is a close kinship system or relationship between these two languages. Even though they are geographically and geo-politically separated, preliminary research on these two languages shows several universal features, one of which is that both languages are agglutinative languages. Therefore, this study is an attempt to find empirical evidence about the separation time between Malay and Malagasy by using language grouping methods and lexicostatistical techniques. The first stage, the researchers collect 300 basic vocabularies compiled by Swadesh (1995). The method used in providing the data is the referential method, while the technique used is the note-taking technique. Second, the researchers d...

The CALA 2019 Proceedings, 2019

Today the Malay language is known to have communities of speakers outside the Malay archipelago, such as in Australia inclusive of the Christmas Islands and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean (Asmah, 2008), the Holy Land of Mecca and Medina (Asmah et al. 2015), England, the Netherlands, France, and Germany. The Malay language is also known to have its presence on the Asian mainland, i.e. Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. As Malays in these three countries belong to a minority, in fact among the smallest of the minorities, questions that arise are those that pertain to: (i) their history of settlement in the localities where they are now; (ii) the position of Malay in the context of the language policy of their country; and (iii) maintenance and shift of the ancestral and adopted languages.

Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews, 2019

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to discuss the linguistic situation around East Flores and Alor-Pantar islands in terms of language change and contact within the area, including Austronesian languages and Papuan languages. Methodology: The linguistic features discussed in this research were based on data collected directly by paying a visit to the village of Baranusa in West Pantar; Tanjung Bunga, in East Flores; and Lewoleba in Lembata. The instruments include 200 Swadesh word list and 646 words referring to cultural vocabulary. Results: Results shows that it is based on research that has been conducted since 2014 which covers identification on the genetic identity and historical relations of Alorese, Kedang, and Lamaholot. These three languages are spoken in many different locations in East Flores-Pantar-Alor. We compare their phonological and lexical evidence to reveal their historical relations which leads to the historical changes from the protoforms as reflected in the...

Studies in Diversity Linguistics, 2014

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 Indonesia. 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 language, 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 morphological 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 lan...