The Alor-Pantar languages: History and typology

Abstract

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.