The Papuan language of Tambora

Abstract

I present data from Tambora, a now extinct language of central Sumbawa, and argue from the lexical data and the inferred phonology, compared with areal norms, that it was a Papuan language spoken by a trading population of southern Indonesia. The existence into historical times of a large and non-reclusive Papuan political entity this far west forces a major revision of our ideas about the linguistic macrohistory of Eastern Indonesia. Show more