Southwest Sabah Revisited

This paper presents the results of a new innovation-based subgrouping argument for the Southwest Sabah languages of northern Borneo, including over 60 languages in Sabah, northern Sarawak, Brunei, and northern Kalimantan Timur. Data for many of these languages have never appeared in the literature before, and few of them have been included in previous studies except those based on lexicostatistics and intelligibility testing. In contrast with previous works, the current study is based on phonological and functor innovations. Discrepancies between the findings of the current study and previous studies are explained as the effect of contact and borrowing, which lexicostatistics and intelligibility testing cannot account for.