Marian Klamer

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.

The Alor-Pantar languages: History and typology

Marian Klamer

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