Traces of Contact in the Lexicon: Austronesian and Papuan Studies ed. by Marian Klamer and Francesca R. Moro (review)

The Austronesian language family, diverse and widespread as it is, has been a hotspot of contact between related and unrelated languages since speakers first moved out of Taiwan and onto the nearby islands. The Papuan languages are likewise typologically diverse, comprising a number of unrelated families and isolates across the Wallacean and Melanesian linguistic areas (cf. Schapper 2015, 2020; inter alia), and have been in contact with one another and the more recent Austronesian arrivals for thousands of years. The areas that now constitute Indonesia and the Philippines in particular have long been the sites of local and global trade routes. Eumusa bananas were domesticated in New Guinea but were brought back to Southeast (SE) Asia in the early Holocene (Denham 2004), well before the breakup of Proto-Austronesian. By 2000 YBP, trade systems involving spices and other forest products reached east all the way to Northwest New Guinea, and by a thousand years after that, the region was connected to major trade routes linking India, China, and SE Asia to points as far east as the Bird’sHead(Spriggs 1998). The arrival of Hinduism in western Indonesia, roughly 2000 YBP, followed shortly thereafter by Buddhism, is associated with the movement of merchants (Gonda 1975), and Arab traders sailed the region beginning in the seventh century. The Portuguese first arrived in Malacca in 1509 and traveled eastwards from there in pursuit of spices, followed in short order by the English, Dutch, and, in the Philippines, the Spanish (Ricklefs 2001). Throughout, islands were connected by regional empires and sultanates such as those of Sriwijaya, Ternate, and Tidore, while smaller groups migrated and otherwise interacted on a more micro scale. These established routes were continuously traveled by local merchants alongside traders, soldiers, and colonists from mainland East and South Asia and Europe, exchanging goods, spreading their religions, intermarrying, conquering, overthrowing, annexing, settling, and governing, and throughout it all talking to one another.

All of this has created an ideal natural laboratory for studying language contact and its effects under various sociolinguistic, historical, and typological scenarios. Interest in the outcomes of contact in the region has peaked in recent years, with the publication of a number of recent articles and collections on the topic, as well as chapters or whole sections devoted to the topic in areal handbooks (Adelaar and Schapper, 2024; Arnold and Gasser, forthcoming; Schapper 2017, 2018; Reesink and Dunn 2018; inter alia). A recent and most worthwhile addition to this list is Traces of Contact in the Lexicon: Austronesian and Papuan Studies, edited by Marian Klamer and Francesca Moro. This volume emerged from a larger project led by Klamer to document the languages of the Lesser Sunda Islands in eastern Indonesia and explore their histories of change through both inheritance and contact. The papers in this volume are a subset of those presented at a workshop on lexical traces of contact held at the conclusion of that project, and five of the eleven chapters are based on data collected as part of the project.

The papers vary in quality across the volume, but all contain worthwhile insights and oftentimes hard-to-find data. Three chapters draw from the LexiRumah database (Kaiping, Edwards, and Klamer 2019), itself an impressive work of scholarship and an invaluable resource for anyone doing comparative studies in the region. The book is divided into two sections by the time depth of the contact under study, one addressing ancient and premodern contact and one on modern and contemporary contact. Ancient and premodern here is defined as contact occurring since the spread of Proto-Malayo-Polynesian (PMP) speakers into Island SE Asia roughly 4,000 years ago and before the arrival of the European colonial powers 3,500 years later, particularly in cases where the contact scenario under investigation no longer holds or where...