Pre-publication draft, to appear in Bolton, Kingsley, Kirkpatrick, Thomas A. and Botha, Werner (eds.

) Handbook of
Asian Englishes.Wiley-Blackwell

1 Asia before English

ALEXANDER R. COUPE AND FRANTIŠEK KRATOCHVÍL
1 Introduction
This chapter describes the linguistic situation that existed in South Asia and Southeast Asia prior
to the European colonial expansion and the gradual adoption of English as an important lingua
franca in the region. Drawing on geographical, archaeological, historical and linguistic evidence,
our aims will be to establish how South Asia and Southeast Asia were first populated, to identify
what languages were used by various ethnic groups inhabiting the region prior to the arrival of
European traders and then missionaries in the 16th century, to recognize historical evidence of
language contact in the modern-day languages spoken in this region, and to summarize
explanations for the types of borrowing and convergence that emerged in that contact.
It is convenient to view the region prior to the arrival of European languages from three
perspectives: South Asia, Mainland Southeast Asia, and island Southeast Asia. After individually
discussing the main drivers of cultural and linguistic influence in this Asian triptych, we
conclude with a summation of the unifying historical, cultural and environmental factors that
have shaped their modern languages. We begin with South Asia, a source of significant cultural,
linguistic and religious influence in the region, then work our way eastward to Mainland
Southeast Asia and beyond to the islands of the Indonesian archipelago and the Philippines.

2 The physical environment of South and Southeast Asia

The rich ecosystems of peninsular India and the human populations they support owe much to
the formation of the Himalayas and the monsoonal weather patterns they have strengthened.
Glaciers created by the high altitude of the Tibetan Plateau feed the great river systems of Asia –
the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Ayeyarwady, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers.
These mighty watercourses and their tributaries have carried their alluvial wealth to the lowlands
for millennia, and they nurtured civilizations founded on agriculture after rice was first
domesticated around the Yangtze Valley approximately 9000 BP and independently in the
Ganges River Valley some 5,000 years later (Molina et al. 2011). The transition from a
peripatetic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to sedentary cultivation is thought to have resulted in
population explosions due to the creation of food surpluses, and this has important consequences
for understanding how languages and their speakers subsequently dispersed throughout Asia,
profoundly reshaping the linguistic composition of the region (see Renfrew 1987; Bellwood and
Diamond 2003).
In northeastern India, southern China and Mainland Southeast Asia (hereafter MSEA),
ecological niches are created by mountainous environments, river valleys and high rainfall in the
monsoonal months of the year. These factors in turn determine the types of crops that can be
grown, how they are cultivated, and what other local resources are available for exploitation. For
example, virtually all the ethnic groups of MSEA make use of varieties of rice as an important
staple, and all exploit bamboo for various uses.
 The great diversity of environments in Island Southeast Asia (hereafter ISEA) is
determined primarily by altitude, soil composition and rainfall patterns. Volcanic islands (Java,
Bali, Lombok, and parts of the Philippines) have very fertile soil and can support large
populations. In non-volcanic islands such as Borneo, the poor quality of the soil renders it
virtually unsuitable for agriculture. Soil quality is degraded after forest clearing, as demonstrated
by recent palm oil plantations rendering barren land in parts of Indonesia and Malaysia. Rainfall
decreases as one moves to the east towards the Australian landmass, and parts of Wallacea and
Eastern Indonesia experience periodic droughts and food shortages. Figure 1 illustrates the
predominant wind patterns in the region during the summer and winter monsoons.

Figure 1 Summer and winter monsoonal patterns in South and Southeast Asia

3 The people, their languages, and histories

The region spanning the Indian subcontinent to Southeast Asia and extending eastward to the
island chain of the Indonesian Archipelago encompasses one of the most linguistically diverse
parts of the world and is currently home to an estimated 2,000 languages. These belong to
diverse language phyla, including Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Dravidian, Hmong-Mien, Indo-
Aryan, Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai, and a number of Papuan families (Hammarström et al. 2018).
The area accounts for approximately one third of humanity and an astonishing thirty-percent or
so of the estimated 7,000 languages currently spoken by the planet’s population. Major language
families are shown in Figure 2 below. The modern patchwork of languages is a result of complex
interactions over past millennia, driven by political and technological innovations, and
conditioned by the natural environment.

2
Figure 2 Current language situation in South and Southeast Asia

Plausible explanations for the location of each language family’s proto-homeland must
necessarily take archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence into account, and the role of
agriculture and animal husbandry must also be given serious consideration in these proposals.
East Asia is identified as an early site for the domestication of rice, which played a central role in
the expansions of early populations of Asian farmers and their languages (Renfrew 1987;
Diamond and Bellwood 2003). Another cradle of agriculture was New Guinea, where taro, yams,
bananas, sago, and sugarcane were cultivated. The early agriculturists were probably the
ancestors of the Trans-New Guinea phylum, who introduced these crops to the arriving
Austronesians. In turn, Austronesian speakers took New Guinean crops with them to Africa and
the Pacific. Figure 3 below demonstrates the major areas where cultural crops and domestic
animals of Eurasia and Africa were domesticated, and Figure 4 suggests that their spread was
closely matched by subsequent human migrations from conjectured homelands.

3
Figure 3 Crops and animal domestication sources and their spread worldwide (based on Diamond and Bellwood
2003, and Bellwood 2013)

Figure 4 Homelands and expansions of linguistic groups in the Old World (based on Diamond and Bellwood 2003,
598)

4
3.1 The people of South Asia, their languages and histories

South Asia is currently inhabited by approximately 1.8 billion people living in eight countries
(Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) and
reportedly speaking 664 known languages (Eberhard et al. 2019). These languages belong to five
major language families of the world: Austroasiatic, Dravidian, Indo-European (more
specifically, the Iranian, Indo-Aryan and Nuristani sub-branches of Indo-Iranian), Sino-Tibetan
(more specifically, the Tibeto-Burman branch), and Tai-Kadai. In addition, three languages with
no known relatives may represent the surviving relics of additional language families. These
isolates are Burushaski, spoken in northern Pakistan, Nihali, spoken in central-west India, and the
Kusunda language of western Nepal.
The following sections briefly discuss the prehistoric linguistic situation in South Asia,
taking into consideration the evidence for recognizing autochthonous populations, and the
estimated dates of entry for other migrating groups.

3.1.1 Austroasiatic speakers in South Asia

Austroasiatic is split into several geographically fragmented groups: Munda and Khasic are
found in the Indian subcontinent, and other languages of the family are discontinuously scattered
in pockets across MSEA (see section 3.2). Munda languages are presently located in east and
central peninsular India. According to authoritative sources (Anderson 2008, 1; Southworth
2005, 64-65; Thapar 1978, 152), speakers of Munda languages predate the migration of Indo-
Aryan speakers into the subcontinent, and some surmise that Austroasiatic speakers once had a
much wider distribution (Masica 1991, 40). Hock (1984, 90), citing Bloch (1946), notes that
place names in the northern Dravidian Kurukh- and Malto-speaking regions have Munda origins,
and that Kurukh legends recount the migration of Kurukh speakers into areas known to be
previously inhabited by Munda speakers.
The Austroasiatic languages spoken in the Khasi and Jaintia Hills of northeastern India
are likely to represent a more recent migration from a putative east Asian homeland, because
their linguistic features are more typical of MSEA languages. On the other hand, Munda shares a
number of typological features with South Asian languages, such as a phonological contrast
between dental and retroflex plosives, a preference for suffixing morphology, and a verb-final
constituent order (Anderson 2008), suggesting a protracted period of cohabitation.

3.1.2 Indo-Aryan speakers

Written records of old Indo-Aryan languages date to the second millennium BCE and are
particularly valuable for determining the prehistoric linguistic situation of South Asia. The oldest
of these is the Ṛgveda. Witzel (2001, 5) observes that this text makes no reference to iron,
therefore it can be dated to before 1000 BCE, when the so-called ‘black metal’ first made an
appearance in South Asia. The text also does not discuss large cities, such as those of the Bronze
Age Indus Valley Civilization that once existed in the northwest of the subcontinent, but only
refers to their ruins, so it must be dated after their collapse around 1900 BCE. Using such methods
of linguistic archaeology, a reasonably accurate date of around 1500 BCE can be established for
both the Ṛgveda and the migration of Aryan Vedic speakers into the subcontinent.

5
3.1.3 Dravidian speakers

Dravidian speakers are likely to be autochthonous to the subcontinent, in common with Munda-
speaking populations, and Proto-Dravidian was possibly the language of the Indus Civilization.
With the exception of the outlier Brahui in Baluchistan and clusters of tribal languages spoken in
central India, Dravidian languages are now confined to the south of peninsular India and northern
Sri Lanka, but they too are believed to have once had a much wider distribution prior to the Indo-
Aryan invasion. This is suggested by the existence of non-Indo-Aryan toponyms in northern
India (Southworth 2005, 288), and by the adoption of Dravidian loan words in Ṛgvedic texts (see
Emeneau 1954 and Witzel 2001 for further discussion).

3.1.4 Sino-Tibetan speakers in South Asia

The Sino-Tibetan languages of South Asia are wholly represented by the Tibeto-Burman branch.
They are mostly confined to the southern edge of the Tibetan plateau, the Himalayan range, and
the Indo-Burmese Arc that forms the drainage divide between the Brahmaputra River and
Chindwin River watersheds of northeastern India and Myanmar. Dating the entry of Tibeto-
Burman speakers is made challenging by the paucity of archaeological records, but their
confinement to the mountainous periphery of South Asia suggests a relatively late arrival in the
chronology of human population movements. The Atharvaveda text of the Aryans refers to a
non-Sanskrit-speaking mleccha people known as the Kirāta; this term is thought to denote
speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages who resided in the mountains of the eastern Himalayan
region between the Dud Kosi and Arun Rivers (Gait 1906, 12). If the Kirāta of the Atharvaveda
were indeed Tibeto-Burman speakers, then their entry into the Himalayas might be dated to
approximately 1200 BCE, and they are most likely to have come via a migration path that first
took them westward across the Tibetan Plateau, and then southward into the valleys of the
Himalayas.

3.1.5 Tai-Kadai speakers in South Asia

Tai-Kadai is the most recent major Asian language family to project into South Asia from the
east. Vestige populations speaking Tai languages are nowadays confined to villages located on
the eastern Assam plain and in the river valleys of neighbouring Arunachal Pradesh, but a related
language known as Ahom was once spoken as the major language of the Brahmaputra Valley,
and it is Ahom that gives the Indian state of Assam its present name. Little is known about the
peoples of this region and their languages until the first millennium of the Christian era (Gait
1906, 1). In the 13th century CE, a tribe of Shans crossed the Patkai range in the northern Indo-
Burmese Arc and established a kingdom in the valley that was to last for 600 years. These
Ahom-speaking invaders recorded the history of their kingdom in documents known as the
buranjis. The buranjis are considered reliable, because they accord with Mohammedan records
of incursions into Assam. They were originally written in the Ahom script (which in turn was
based on the Pali script), but gradually came to be written in Assamese after the Ahom began
converting to Hinduism (Gait 1906, v).
Ahom is now a dead language, but it influenced modern Assamese, which diverges
significantly from other Indo-Aryan languages in respect to its phonology and grammar. It lacks
a dental~retroflex contrast in plosive sounds, for example, yet retains the representation of both

6
dental and retroflex sounds in its orthography. The loss of this erstwhile contrast is unusual in the
modern Indo-Aryan languages but could be attributable to language contact, because at the time
of the Ahom empire there were also numerous tribes in the Brahmaputra and Barak River valleys
speaking various Tibeto-Burman languages. Bilingual speakers may have left a number of other
imprints on Assamese, such as the extensive numeral classifier system found in the modern
language. Large numeral classifier systems are very common in MSEA languages, but tend to be
only rudimentary in the modern Indo-Aryan languages.
Toponyms in the form of river names represent an older layer of migration that preceded
the Ahom. While only a few rivers of Upper Assam include the Tai word nam ‘water’ as part of
an erstwhile compound, for example, the Namphuk River, many more include a formative di/ti
that appears to function as a classifying prefix, as observed in the names of the Dehing, Dikhu
and Disang rivers that drain westward into the Brahmaputra, and the Tizü and Tiho rivers that
drain eastward into the Chindwin. These river names possibly began as compound nouns
involving the word for water, which is reconstructed to Proto-Tibeto-Burman by Benedict (1972)
as *ti(y). Reflexes are common in languages belonging to the Bodo-Konyak-Jinghpaw branch
(for example, Chang tèi ‘water’), proto-speakers of which were likely to be in the vanguard of
the Sino-Tibetan incursion into northeastern India.

3.2 The people of Mainland Southeast Asia, their languages and histories

MSEA is home to populations speaking languages currently assumed to constitute five separate
linguistic phyla: Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Hmong-Mien, Sino-Tibetan, and Tai-Kadai.
Determining the genetic relationships of these languages has been proven to be extremely
challenging for historical linguists, due to the fact that most are characterized by a simple
monosyllabic word structure lacking inflection and other useful morphological evidence of
phylogeny. Scholars have therefore had to rely entirely upon correspondences in vocabulary for
establishing relatedness (Haudricourt 1966, 44). The difficulty of this endeavour has been
compounded by a prolonged period of contact between genetically unrelated languages and
centuries of stable multilingualism. This has resulted in a remarkable degree of similarity in their
syntactic structure, such that MSEA is claimed to have the greatest extent of linguistic
convergence on the planet (Enfield 2011, 3).
A plausible motivation for the southern migration of post-Neolithic farmers via valleys
cut by the great rivers of Southeast Asia was the domestication of rice, millet and other cultivars
east of the Tibetan Plateau, resulting in burgeoning population expansions that forced
agriculturalists to search for new lands. The rise of agrarian nation-states based on wet rice
cultivation following the agricultural revolution in East Asia may well have contributed to further
population movements. According to Scott (2009), the extensive mountain ranges of Southeast
Asia and beyond constitute a region he refers to as Zomia, which has served historically as an
upland refuge zone for minorities fleeing from corvée labour and taxation imposed by powerful
administrative elites in lowland padi states. In MSEA, the main booty carried off in victorious
military campaigns against other kingdoms was manpower. The Thai expression for this is kwàːt
mɯːang, literally ‘sweep city’. This practice brought entire communities to Tai and Burmese padi
states to exploit their labour for intensive wet rice cultivation. The centralized concentration of
labour must have also encouraged a shift to the language of the rulers, just as it did in the
plantations of the West Indies.

7
3.2.1 Austroasiatic speakers in MSEA

The Austroasiatic languages are dispersed over a large swathe of Asia stretching from peninsular
India to Vietnam, and this has fuelled great speculation about the family’s homeland. Sidwell and
Blench (2011) propose a ‘Southeastern Riverine Hypothesis’ to explain their distribution in
MSEA and claim that speakers spread up river valleys from the southeast. But somewhat
problematically for this hypothesis, Diffloth (2011, 299-300) reports in the same volume that he
is unable to reconstruct a Proto-Austroasiatic word for ‘boat’ in all the branches of Austroasiatic.
Diffloth (1984, 1-8) presents archaeological evidence attesting to the presence of a Mon
Buddhist kingdom named Dvāravāti in Ancient Thailand, the existence of which was
corroborated by Chinese Buddhist pilgrims travelling to India in the 7th century CE, and he
discusses other inscriptions in Old Mon dated between the 6th to the 9th century CE. Some
scholars have also assumed the existence of a Mon kingdom at Taton, but according to Gutman
and Hudson (2004), there is little if any archaeological evidence for the Mon being in southern
Burma before 1100 CE. Subsequent migration into lower Burma is thought to have been due to
pressure from Burmans extending their Bagan empire after defeating the city-states of the Pyu, a
Tibeto-Burman-speaking people who controlled Upper Burma between the second century BCE
and the ninth century CE.
During and after this period of Burman expansion, many Mon speakers became bilingual
in Old Burmese, and a large number subsequently became monolingual Burmese speakers. In an
insightful paper, Bradley (1980) demonstrates how the word structure common to numerous
modern languages of MSEA can be traced to the substratum influence of the Mon, many of
whom gave up their ancestral language in favour of a Tibeto-Burman or Tai language. The
distinctive sesquisyllabic word pattern of a minor syllable prefixed to a major syllable extends to
the west and is similarly found in scores of Tibeto-Burman languages of Northeast India,
suggesting that their speakers also came into contact with Austroasiatic languages in the course
of a westward migration.
Many formerly Austroasiatic-speaking communities of MSEA have given up their native
languages in favour of Tai-Kadai and Tibeto-Burman languages. Such language shifts may have
been motivated by the socioeconomic benefits that accrued from speaking a superstratum
language in militarized padi states such as Angkor, Ayutthaya, Bagan, and Sukhothai that have
risen and fallen in the Southeast Asian lowlands over the past two millennia. If people of diverse
tongues were pressed into corvée serfdom in these highly centralized agrarian states, as proposed
by Scott (2009), then their individual linguistic identities may well have been abandoned in
favour of the languages of their rulers, resulting in the loss of their native languages.

3.2.2 Hmong-Mien speakers in MSEA

Small pockets of Hmong-Mien (a.k.a. Miao-Yao) speakers are presently dispersed through the
east-central and southern provinces of Mainland China and extend into northern Vietnam, Laos
and Thailand, the pressure of Han Chinese expansion motivating their southern migration in the
19th and 20th centuries (Ratliff 2010, 1). This independent language family of East Asia and
MSEA demonstrates a surprising amount of shared vocabulary as a result of longstanding
bilingualism in Chinese and contact with other languages of the region.
This has complicated its genetic classification, resulting in considerable disagreement
amongst scholars. According to Ratliff (2010, 1-2), Chinese scholars traditionally classify

8
Hmong-Mien as belonging to the Sino-Tibetan phylum, but this assumption is not shared by
scholars outside of China, who give much less importance to typological similarities attributed to
contact with Sinitic languages. She also notes (p. 224) that at one time or another, prominent
scholars have proposed a genetic relationship between Hmong-Mien and every one of its
neighbours, such is the extent of its areal convergence. According to Sagart et al. (2005, 2) it is
only the most basic portion of the reconstructed Hmong-Mien lexicon that does not have a Sinitic
source.

3.2.3 Sino-Tibetan speakers in MSEA

Sino-Tibetan in MSEA is mostly represented by the Lolo-Burmese and Karenic subgroups of

Tibeto-Burman, and their speakers are generally located in the mountains of northern Laos,
Thailand, Myanmar and Vietnam. Additionally, northern Myanmar is home to Kachinic
languages, and at the western extreme of MSEA can be found Chin speakers. Both of these
linguistic communities spill over into South Asia. Given their distribution, it is likely that groups
migrated to the upper territories of MSEA via southwest China, and many then pushed further to
the west and into the ranges of the Indo-Burmese Arc. Speakers of Burmese, the national
language of present-day Myanmar, came to dominate the Ayeyarwady river valley and beyond
from the 12th century CE after defeating the kingdom of the Pyu, and they gradually absorbed
Mon-speaking communities as they expanded their territory, as already noted in section 3.2.1.
According to Matisoff (1991, 471), Proto-Sino-Tibetan was spoken on the eastern Tibetan
Plateau some 6,000 years ago, but he proposes that speakers of Proto-Tibeto-Burman did not
penetrate into Southeast Asia until the beginning of the first millenium CE. The widespread
sesquisyllabic word structure common to the Tibeto-Burman languages of MSEA is not attested
in related languages whose speakers migrated westward via the Tibetan plateau (i.e. the Bodic
branch, Qiangic etc). This strongly suggests that Proto-Tibeto-Burman speakers of the MSEA
languages took a very different migration path to their current locations, and this route exposed
them to intensive contact situations with Austroasiatic speakers, who most plausibly were the
source of the sesquisyllabic pattern.

3.2.4 Tai-Kadai speakers in MSEA

Tai-Kadai languages have long been the subject of debates about the origins of this family. Luo
(2008) reviews work on the Tai languages and reports that various scholars (Gedney 1965;
Matisoff 1991; Wyatt 1984) are in general agreement that the language family has a time depth
of approximately 2,500 years, and that the homeland was likely to be in southern China’s
Guizhou-Guanxi region. While the validity of a Tai language family is beyond doubt (Li 1977),
there is considerable disagreement about its link to Sinitic, Austronesian languages and Hmong-
Mien – interested readers are directed to Ostapirat (2005) and Diller, Edmondson and Luo (2008)
for detailed information.
The first Tai inscription is dated 1292 CE, which suggests that Tai speakers were a quite
recent arrival in their current locations. It appears that they may have been equally recent in
adopting rice cultivation, compared to the other linguistic families of MSEA. Blench (2005, 40)
proposes that the paucity of Proto-Tai vocabulary for rice and its homogeneity across dialects
suggests that Tai speakers were not rice cultivators originally. In contrast, the reconstructed

9
lexicon for rice terminology is abundant in Proto-Austroasiatic, Proto-Austronesian, and Proto-
Sino-Tibetan.

3.3 The people of Island Southeast Asia, their languages and histories

A large number of ethnic and linguistic groups have settled in ISEA over the past millennia.
Nowadays the area is mostly populated by Austronesian speakers, with Papuan groups restricted
to Wallacea and further east. Two ancient migration gateways are recognized: the Moluccan and
Halmahera Islands in the north, and the Lesser Sunda chain in the south.
The first modern humans of Southeast Asia and the western Pacific are known as
Australo-Melanesians, and their presence in the area in some cases predates the 50,000-year
horizon of the carbon-dating method. The earliest populations spread along the tropical littoral
environments into Sundaland perhaps as early as 60,000 years ago (Barker et al. 2007, 258-59).
The Australo-Melanesians are defined by their craniometric features and genetic phenotype
(mtDNA haplogroup M and shared Y-chromosome types) and include the so-called Negrito
populations of the Andaman Islands, West Malaysia (Semang), the Philippines (Agta, Aeta,
Batak), Melanesia, New Guinea, and Australia (Bellwood 2013, 76-77). Groups in Borneo,
Sumatra and Java share much of their DNA with MSEA people who currently speak
Austroasiatic languages (Alexander Adelaar, p.c.).
The flooding of the Sunda shelf and Sahul drove the Australo-Melanesians into
mountainous ‘green deserts’ (Guillot et al. 2013), as the savannahs suitable for larger grazing
mammals turned into forests. Such a view stresses the low carrying capacity of the tropical rain
forests, which was insufficient to sustain a purely foraging lifestyle and forced human
populations to depend on the barter of forest products for food (Bailey et al. 1989). This
‘professional hunter-gatherer’ hypothesis is not accepted by all scholars, who stress the
variability of the carrying capacity of the environment in ISEA (see Endicott and Bellwood 1991;
Bellwood 1993, 2011, 2013).

3.3.1 Papuan speakers

Agriculture first appeared in the New Guinea area around 8,000 BP, then subsequently spread to
neighbouring islands that were settled from New Guinea (Denham et al. 2003). Papuan people
migrated westward into Wallacea (but not beyond Bali), and associated New Guinean crops
(sago, sugar cane, taro, bananas, yams) diffused with them. The most prominent Papuan
linguistic families outside of the New Guinea mainland are Timor-Alor-Pantar (Holton et al.
2012), West Papuan (Voorhoeve 1987; Wichmann 2013), and the extinct isolate Tambora
(Donohue 2007). The relationship of these languages to the language families of New Guinea is
much debated.
Banana, sago, canarium, coconut, sandalwood, and various fruit trees were spread by
horticulturalists to Borneo, the east of ISEA, and New Guinea (Bellwood 2006, 2013). Sather
(2006) discusses swidden-cultivation-like circular movements through the rainforest, as practiced
by the Penan of Sarawak. It is possible that such patterns were the default before the
consolidation of horticulture. Hoogervorst (2013a, b) and Blench (2008) offer excellent
overviews of crop and fruit tree diffusion from ISEA. A precise mechanism of diffusion
combining genetic, linguistic and archaeological evidence is yet to be proposed.

10
3.3.2 Austronesian speakers

Maritime Austronesian speakers began migrating to ISEA from their homeland in Taiwan around
5,000 BP. They first expanded southward into the Philippines, Borneo, Sulawesi, the Moluccas,
the Sunda Archipelago, Vietnam and Oceania, and then eventually westward to Madagascar.
Austronesian speakers brought domesticated animals (dogs and pigs) and pottery with them.
However, the spread of rice and other crops followed much later, and early agriculture was
primarily based on the New Guinean ‘crop package’ (Denham 2013). Austronesian speakers in
Borneo specialized in hunter-gatherer subsistence, and other Austronesian groups developed
equivalent sea-based subsistence systems. Sather (2006) argues that food-producing and foraging
economies developed in parallel and in interdependency with food producers, and can therefore
not be considered a ‘reversal’ of agriculture, but rather as a specialisation conditioned by the
environment. In this process, the hunter-gatherer groups developed a symbiotic relationship with
the agriculturists, as did the Philippine Negritos and Peninsular Aslians, or the Sea Nomads such
as the Moken, Orang Laut and Sama Bajau (Benjamin 1985; Headland and Reid 1989; Chou
2003; Sather 2006; Watson Andaya 2006).

3.3.3 The political integration of Southeast Asia

Ships carrying metals, spices, fragrant woods and artisanal produce rode the monsoonal winds
along a trade network that spanned all the way to the Mediterranean in the Antiquity, and to East
Africa and Madagascar in the first millennium CE (Brucato et al. 2016). European ships extended
the network further to the west, reaching the ports of South and West Europe, and the Spanish
conquest of America connected routes to the New World. Western merchants were important
agents of cultural exchange in Southeast Asia and were responsible for the import (and
sometimes the imposition) of new religions, associated liturgical languages such as Sanskrit, Pali
and Arabic, the orthographies in which they were written, new systems of governance, new
foods, and new technologies that transformed ways of living and thinking.
India and China constitute large adjacent states that have always exerted considerable
sway over the interface area of Southeast Asia. In recognition of this, Matisoff (1991) coined the
terms ‘Indosphere’ and ‘Sinosphere’ to characterize their great domains of overlapping cultural
and linguistic influence. The region is now represented by a political alliance known as the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is arguably a modern reflection of
ancient trade contacts and political relations between Southeast Asia and its neighbours.
It has been argued by Lieberman (2003, 2010) that the history of Southeast Asia has to be
conceptualized within a gradual and often interrupted integration process taking place in parallel
in diverse regions of Eurasia, including the Indosphere and the Sinosphere. Interregna triggered
by state breakdown and war interrupt the integration process, which accelerated in the second
millennium and manifested in outcomes of language contact (e.g. multilingualism, borrowing,
assimilation, and sometimes language death).
In Vietnam, the Bronze Age (1,000–500 BCE) saw the rise of Dong Son, the first
dominant culture in the area. Dong Son is known for its artefacts scattered throughout Southeast
Asia (Calò 2014), and its exchange networks were based on high value and easily transported
objects, such as spices, fragrant woods, metal artefacts, ceramics, beads and jewellery. Dong Son
settlements were distributed over an area stretching from the South China Sea and beyond into
the Indonesian Archipelago and the Bay of Bengal (Hung et al. 2013; Carter 2015; Hung 2017);

11
locations at strategic points with easy access to fresh waterways betray their maritime culture
(Calò 2014, 71).
Southeast Asia became the heart of a global trading network in the Iron Age (500 BCE to
200 CE), during which some strong regional networks emerged. Chinese records known as the
Book of Han document a trade route stretching from China to India by 111 BCE (Hung 2017,
638). From the west, the Roman traders reached India by about 100 BCE. The existence of a trade
network spanning the Middle East (Egypt), India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam and ISEA is also
well documented archaeologically. The Indian sources Niddesa, Ramayana and Jatakas from this
period make reference to Indianized places – in particular Java, Sumatra, Burma, Thailand,
Cambodia, and Champa – and also mention Indian people and seafarers (Coedès 1968, 16-18).
Native written records appear during the Classic period (ca. 600-900 CE) around Palembang
(Bukit Seguntang), the centre of the Srivijayan thalassocracy that controlled long-distance trade
and also standardized weight, measures and coinage. The Srivijayans sent expeditions against the
Javanese (Sailendra), against the Chams (Champa), the Khmers (Indrapura) and the Malay
Peninsula kingdoms of Patani and Kedah, raiding as far as the Lavo kingdom (Thailand). Hindu
priests and Buddhist monks travelled from India and Sri Lanka to Southeast Asia and spread
Brahmanism and Buddhism, although the diffusion of symbolic systems and cosmologies from
India and Sri Lanka had already started during the Bronze Age.
During the increased competition of the Middle Classic period (900–1200 CE), the
Srivijayans lost their trade monopoly. Major Hindu and Buddhist monuments were constructed in
Java (e.g. Prambanan, and Borobudur). The Angkor (Cambodia) and Bagan (Burma) kingdoms
projected their power and came to dominate MSEA. The first enclaves of Indian, Arabo-Persian
and Chinese were established, and knowledge of the archipelago finally reached the west via
Marco Polo’s account:

When you sail from Chamba, 1,500 miles in a course between south and south-east,
you come to a great Island called Java. And the experienced mariners of those
Islands who know the matter well, say that it is the greatest Island in the world, and
has a compass of more than 3,000 miles. It is subject to a great King and tributary to
no one else in the world. The people are Idolaters. The Island is of surpassing
wealth, producing black pepper, nutmegs, spikenard, galingale, cubebs, cloves, and
all other kinds of spices. This Island is also frequented by a vast amount of
shipping, and by merchants who buy and sell costly goods from which they reap
great profit. Indeed the treasure of this Island is so great as to be past telling. And I
can assure you the Great Kaan never could get possession of this Island, on account
of its great distance, and the great expense of an expedition thither. The merchants
of Zayton and Manzi draw annually great returns from this country.
(Polo et. al. 1993, Chapter 6)

The Bagan and Angkor kingdoms declined in the Late Classic period (1200-1400 CE),
unable to compete with the rising power of the militarised Tai padi kingdoms. Srivijayans were
regularly raided by the Javanese and eventually forced to relocate to Melaka, marking the start of
the Post-Classic period (1400–1600 CE). The Srivijayan retreat coincided with the rising
influence of Arabic language and Islam. Further knowledge of Southeast Asia spread to Europe:
Fra Mauro’s famous map, created around 1450 CE, depicts South and Southeast Asia, including
Java, Sumatra, Sri Lanka, Champa and the Chinese coast. However, the problem with ancient

12
names was that except for busy harbours, distant coasts and islands often had just a name in the
language of the sailors; this frequently had no relation to native names, making many locations in
the written sources untraceable (de Roever 2002:36). The Portuguese Capture of Malacca in
1511 following their Conquest of Goa one year earlier marks the end of precolonial times.

4 Pre-colonial language contact

The effects of language contact are gradual and sensitive to the nature and frequency of the
contact between involved language communities. Three major factors are listed here, from the
weakest to the strongest:

• Lexical borrowing is a transfer of a word from one language into another, as a result of contact
between their speakers. Examples of such borrowing can be found in religious terms from
Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, which diffused widely in the area.
• Structural borrowing or structural convergence is a process during which the organisational
principles of two languages align more closely as result of intense contact between their
speakers, who are typically bilingual and cohabit. Convergence occurs on the level of the
sound system (phonology), word order (syntax), and pragmatics (e.g. particles such as lah in
Singaporean Colloquial English, Malay and Chinese).
• Language shift or language replacement is a result of radical political changes such as military
conquest, resulting in the subjugated community giving up its original language in favour of
the language of the dominant group. Language shift has affected the entire area discussed here
in favour of national languages, and is predicted to result in the further loss of linguistic
diversity within this century. The original language, or substrate, remains detectable in certain
parts of the vocabulary, and often also in place names and specialized lexicon.

We will now turn to a description of language contact zones in South and Southeast Asia that
arose due to migration processes. Subsequently, we will survey contact scenarios brought about
by trade and cultural exchange, followed by a discussion of lexical and grammatical borrowing
patterns that characterise the region.

4.1 Language contact zones

Three language contact areas are recognizable in South and Southeast Asia. The first historically
involved the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages in the Indian subcontinent. The second is
MSEA, a multilingual region with five language families showing a remarkable degree of
structural similarity. The third contact area encircles New Guinea, where the Austronesian family
came in contact with numerous Papuan families.
It is generally assumed that expanding agriculturists linguistically assimilated the original
hunter-gatherer populations. The assimilation did not occur where the arriving population
encountered other food-producing societies – this is the so called ‘Neolithic standoff’, observed
between Austronesian- and Papuan-speaking populations in eastern Indonesia (Lansing et al.
2011).

13
4.1.1 Contact and convergence in South Asia

Arriving in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent around 1500 BCE, the Indo-Aryan speakers
entered a region that was already occupied by Dravidian speakers. The evidence for early Indo-
Aryan~Dravidian contact is Dravidian loanwords borrowed into Vedic Sanskrit, for example,
ulūkhala- ‘mortar’, kuṇḍa ‘pit’, khála- ‘threshing floor’, kāṇa ‘one-eyed’, and mayūra ‘peacock’
(Emeneau 1954/1980, 92–100, cited in Krishnamurti 2003, 6). Additionally, prehistoric
substrates appear to have contributed loanwords to the modern languages of India. Witzel (2001,
14) notes that 40% of agricultural terms in Hindi come from an unknown Indo-Gangetic
language, and that the 24% of the vocabulary of the isolate Nihali has no known cognates (and is
representative of the oldest traceable language on the subcontinent), while 36% has a Munda
origin and 9% has a Dravidian origin. Waves of migration by speakers of prehistoric languages
may have left their linguistic influences and then disappeared entirely, leaving only lexical traces
in non-cognate terms that persist in the modern languages. The characteristic features of the
South Asian linguistic area (e.g. a phonological contrast between dental and retroflex plosives, a
preference for suffixing morphology, verb-final constituent order and dative subjects, among
others) may be largely a language contact outcome.

4.1.2 Contact and convergence in Mainland Southeast Asia

MSEA is noteworthy for the extent of its parallel grammaticalization processes and linguistic
convergence (e.g. see Bisang 1996). This affects not only vocabulary, but also syntactic
structure, such that a single grammatical template can often serve to replicate the same sentence
structure in genetically unrelated languages. Often all that differs are the words.
Because these languages fall under the linguistic and cultural influence of the Sinosphere,
they have numerous features in common with Sinitic languages. Some have developed directly
through contact. A striking example is the case of Vietnamese, an Austroasiatic language that
evolved a complex system of lexical tone contrasts as a result of sustained language contact with
tonal Chinese varieties during the first millennium CE (Haudricourt 1954).
Many MSEA languages share patterns of grammaticalization that suggest the diffusion of
conceptual schemas, such as the development of causative and benefactive markers from the verb
‘give’, progressive aspect marking functions evolving from a verb meaning ‘exist, stay’, and the
widespread occurrence of parallel polyfunctionality demonstrated by a verb with the meaning of
‘acquire’ (Enfield 2003).

4.1.3 Contact and convergence in Wallacea

Another contact area is located in Wallacea, where communities of Austronesian and Papuan
speakers met. The encounter gave rise to a large linguistic area known as East Nusantara (Klamer
2004), which is characterised by structural and cultural convergence. Austronesian and Papuan
languages in contact both underwent structural simplification, and this process is still continuing
(Klamer 2012). A special case of structural convergence is known as metatypy, whereby the
lexicons remain largely separated, but the grammatical repertoire and conceptual system are
aligned (Ross 2007).
With a firm footing on the advanced reconstruction of the Austronesian family (Blust
2009), interdisciplinary research reveals intriguing details about prehistoric interactions between

14
Austronesian and Papuan populations (Lansing et al. 2007; Tumonggor et al. 2013, inter alia):
genetic research suggests a long period of matrilocal residence in Austronesian societies, during
which Papuan men married Austronesian women and moved to Austronesian villages. Such
interaction would facilitate a gradual transfer of local environment knowledge to Austronesian
speakers, and at the same time stabilise the acquisition of Austronesian languages (Lansing et al.
2011). A non-Austronesian substrate has been suggested for Sumba and other parts Eastern
Indonesia (Lansing et al. 2007; Denham and Donohue 2009).

4.2 Major contact languages and their functions

Ancient language contact zones coexisted with contact languages that gained their importance
through trade or as vehicles of cultural interaction. Regular interethnic contact leads to the
formation of such contact languages. Depending on the contact frequency and degree of
multilingualism in the society, contact languages vary in complexity, ranging from the simplest
pidgins and lingua francas, to more complex creoles. The main difference lies in their
acquisition. Creoles are acquired by children as their first language, but pidgins are not.
South and Southeast Asia have seen a number of languages used in interethnic
communication. Two detailed overviews for Southeast Asia are Adelaar (1996) and Blust (2009),
on which parts of our discussion are based. Following Blust (2009, 17), we distinguish four
major periods associated with both cultural and religious influence: (i) Indian, (ii) Chinese, (iii)
Islamic, and (iv) European. Throughout these four periods, Malay, (Old)-Javanese, and later
Tagalog were languages of major trading polities of the region. Historical centres of power and
governance had a profound influence on their neighbours, regardless of their affiliation.

4.2.1 Sanskrit

Indian influence spread eastward to Southeast Asia from the beginning of the current era.
Evidence comes from Sanskrit stone inscriptions describing sacrificial gifts and military
conquests. Religious texts provided the common medium by which writing spread from India to
MSEA and further to ISEA in the 1st millennium CE. Sanskrit, the language of the Brahmins,
was an important vehicle of culture for the spread of Hinduism, its influential epics such as the
Ramayana, and the cult of the devaraja (god-king) into Southeast Asia. These writings used
Brāhmī-based abugida orthographies that originated from South India, possibly as late as the 3rd
century BCE, and which may ultimately be related to Semitic syllabic scripts (Salomon 1996,
378).
Abugidas record consonant-vowel sequences but differ from syllabic writing systems, in
that characters with shared vowel or consonant sounds show a resemblance to each other.
Writing systems adapted from Brāhmī scripts are still used by Burmese, Khmer, Lao, Mon, Shan
and Thai – essentially all the languages with a Theravada Buddhism heritage. The oldest records
are some Cham inscriptions of South Vietnam; these are in Sanskrit and are dated to the third
century CE, thus preceding the spread of Theravada Buddhism into the region (Court 1996a, 445).
One feature that links all the ancient scripts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and even the Kana of
Japanese is the order of consonant arrangement in dictionaries, which is based upon articulatory
phonetics. This begins with the velars and progresses through the palatal sounds, retroflexes,
dentals and labials, followed by a miscellaneous collection of frictionless approximant sounds
(w, l, y, h), and sibilant sounds (s, sh).

15
Figure 5 “May Śiva bless those who take delight in the language of the gods” by ‘Kālidāsa’ is written in all indic
scripts which are used in the present world (image by Abhay Agarwal).

Brahmins came with traders from South India and brought their systems of belief and
administration. Local rulers called upon them to legitimize their own power and dominion. As
spiritual mediums to the supernatural, Brahmin priests were invested with the power to
consecrate the authority of royalty in the early political states of Cambodia and Java, and later in
the kingdoms of Burma and Siam. Such a status is still enjoyed by the Brahmin pandits of
modern Thailand, who continue to play a central role in royal ceremonies by presiding over
rituals with Brahmanical roots (Wales 1931).

16
 After the diffusion of Austronesian languages (Proto-Western Malayo-Polynesian, and
Proto-Central Malayo-Polynesian) and the subsequent formation of dialects, literary Sanskrit
entered maritime Southeast Asia as the language of commerce, technology, religion and science.
These influences were incorporated most significantly in Old Malay, Old Javanese, and Old
Cham. All three languages became conduits of Sanskrit influence in maritime Southeast Asia,
and during this period Malay, Pali and Sanskrit loans spread throughout ISEA.
Compared to the diffusion of the more ancient Brahmanical belief system in Southeast
Asia, the spread of Buddhism is much better understood. Scores of Buddhist monks brought
Buddhist beliefs to the region along a number of major paths, shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6 Spread of Buddhism to Southeast and East Asia (map by Gunawan Kartapranata)

Travel journals by Chinese monks, among whom the 7th century I-Ching is perhaps the
best-known, reported a high degree of Sanskrit knowledge in the cultural and religious centres of
Shih-li-fo-shih (likely Srivijaya, also known as Mo-lo-yu), and recommended that other monks
spend some time in the Straits capital of the Srivijayan empire to learn Sanskrit and deepen their

17
knowledge of Buddhism. After ten years in India at the Nālānda University, I-Ching spent an
additional four years in Shih-li-fo-shih, where he translated Buddhist writings into Chinese
(Coedès 1968, 81).
The Indian period lasted for almost a millennium, during which the Malays disseminated
their legacy throughout their trading network, reaching all the way to the Philippines. Besides
Sanskrit, other Indian languages such as Gujarati, Bengali, Telugu, and Sinhalese played a role,
but Tamil was probably the most influential among them. The influence of Indian languages and
people in Southeast Asia continues to the present day.

4.2.2 Malay

Malay became the de-facto lingua franca of ISEA for almost two millennia, and its spread is
documented in stone inscriptions from the 7th century CE. Malay was not replaced as a lingua
franca by any other language (such as Javanese, Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese or Dutch) until the
arrival of English around the time of World War II, and it had the status of a prestige language in
the Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic periods. It was the main conduit for the introduction of Islam
and the earlier religions in ISEA. At some point, Malay identity merged with Islam, and the
expression masuk Melayu (lit. ‘enter Malay’) meant both converting to Islam and shifting into
Malay language. The Malay conquest of the chief gateways to spices and other commodities
gave rise to a number of Malay sultanates, where new contact varieties of Malay developed. A
detailed overview of the spread of Malay is Adelaar and Prentice (1996). Proto-Malayic is
reconstructed in Adelaar (1992), and its structural diversification is described in Adelaar (2005).
There is rich evidence of technology transfer to India in navigation, and in plant cultivation
(Manguin 1996; Hoogervorst 2013a, 2013b). Malay loanwords spread into the Indian Ocean, into
Yemeni Arabic, and beyond into the languages of East Africa. The Philippines, initially under
Malay influence, followed a separate trajectory in the modern period after being incorporated in
Spanish colonial possessions and later came under (American) English influence.

4.2.3 Chinese

Chinese contact with Southeast Asia was commercial and did not spread Chinese culture or
literacy southward, as was the case with Korea, Japan, and Northern Vietnam. Vietnamese is the
only Austroasiatic language of MSEA that did not use an Indic-derived script prior to the
European colonial period; it also has the distinction of being the only language of the region in
which a writing system was forcibly imposed on a population by a conquering power (Court
1996b, 443). It was originally written using a logographic writing system based on Classical
Chinese after the Han invasion of 111 BCE. This Han or ‘scholarly script’ was used alongside the
Chữ Nôm ‘southern’ logographic script, to which were added characters to accommodate
differences between Vietnamese and Sinitic. During the 17th century, Catholic missionaries
developed a modified Roman-based script that employed diacritic symbols on vowels to account
for the tone system that had developed under the period of Sinitic domination. The Roman script
was initially used only for religious materials, but was accorded official status by the colonial
French administration in the early 20th century (Nguyễn 1996).
Chinese influence was the strongest in the Philippines, reaching its peak in Southeast
Asia during the early Ming dynasty. The main agents of contact were speakers of Hakka and
various Min languages of coastal southern China. Perhaps the most dramatic engagement with

18
Southeast Asia was the 1293 expedition against Java, during the reign of Qubilai Qan. The
expedition was justified by Chinese commercial interests: ‘most of these overseas nations
produce rare treasures which by taking would enrich China’ (Lo 2012, 303). The Malay
archipelago was dominated by the Javanese state of Tumapel, which displaced the Malay
Srivijaya empire. The king of Tumapel refused the Yuan demands for tribute and had the Yuan
envoy branded. Qubilai Qan dispatched a naval force of 20,000 men from the coastal provinces.
After a failed diplomatic attempt, the fleet landed south of modern day Surabaya. The Majapahit
ruler engaged the Chinese to defeat the rival kingdom of Kediri and then repealed and drew out
the Yuan force and forged an alliance with Champa, another vehement opponent of the Chinese.
Malay Annals of Semarang report the period of the Ming period expeditions. In 1407, the
Chinese fleet seized Kukang (Palembang), a nest of Chinese pirates from Hokkien [sic]. The first
Hanafite Muslim Chinese community was established there the same year and in a large number
of places in the following decade (de Graaf and Pigeaud 1984). The Chinese admirals and fleet
officials, who were recruited from Hanafie Muslims, actively promoted the building of mosques
along the coasts of the Nan Yang (南洋, lit. ‘Southern Ocean’, i.e. ISEA). After the Ming
voyages ended, Hanafite Muslim Chinese communities degenerated and the famous Sam Poo
Kong mosque, set up by Zheng He in Semarang, was converted into a temple known as Gedung
Batu (de Graaf and Pigeaud 1984).

4.2.4 Arabic and Persian

The last major influence on the language, culture and administration of the subcontinent prior to
the arrival of the Europeans is attributable to the expansion of Islam. This actually began in the
7th century CE with the arrival of Arab traders on the west coast of peninsular India. From this
period we possess the first written sources proving direct contact between ISEA and the Arab
world. In 718 CE, the Srivijayan king Sri Indravan wrote to the Caliph of Medina, Umar ibn Abd
al-Aziz to request Muslim preachers to come to his Sumatran court to explain the new teaching.
The contacts intensified after Islamic invasions from the northwest of the Indian
subcontinent beginning in the 11th century CE, culminating in the establishment of the Delhi
sultanates during the period 1206-1526 CE. The court language of these Muslim dynasties was
Persian, and this served as the language of administration for the best part of 1,000 years (Masica
1991, 48). The infusion of Perso-Islamic traditions, art and architecture, culture, language,
politics, administration and military technology had a significant impact on many aspects of life
in South Asia and contributed to the region’s pluralism and expanding trade links (Asher and
Talbot 2006, 2-3). Harnessing the winds of the seasonal monsoons, these cultural and trade
networks extended westward to Africa and the Middle East, and also eastward to Southeast Asia.
There are several theories for the origin of Islam in Southeast Asia, with Gujarat, Persia,
China and the Arabian Peninsula all being proposed as possible sources. The connection between
the Middle East, ISEA, and Sumatra in particular dates back to antiquity. Arab traders visited the
north coast of Sumatra frequently from at least the tenth century (Blust 2009, 16). Gujarat was a
source of Muslim missionaries from the 13th century, and of highly desired silks. The famous
Arabic traveller Ibn Battúta visited South and Southeast Asia in the middle of the fourteenth
century. He reports on the Indian flavour of local Islam and the vibrant spice trade. He describes
details of their arrival in various ports, local court customs, and local admirals granting traders
permission to land (Ibn Battúta and Gibb 1929). However, the spread of Islam initially was not
rapid, because at the time of Polo’s visit in 1292, Sumatran people were still Buddhist.

19
 With the conversion of the Srivijayan court, the spread of Arabic influence accelerated
and Islam became synonymous with Malay identity. Malay missionaries spread Islam in ISEA
and monotheistic ideas diffused even into the peripheries, some of which did not convert until the
20th century. Besides the Malay court, Islamic sultanates were founded elsewhere at a rapid pace
during the 15th century, for example, Aceh, Brunei, Gowa, Ternate, and Tidore. Accounts of
conversions and closer relationships with the Islamic world are recorded in the classical Malay
literature of that period (Watson Andaya & Andaya 2016, 140-41). With the arrival of the
Western colonizers and the fall of Melaka, Islam spread along the Malay trade network. The need
for conversion became more urgent and was amplified by the opposition of native Islam to the
arrival of Christianity.

4.3 Lexical borrowing and grammatical convergence

Lasting evidence of past language contact is preserved in vocabulary and grammatical structure.
Lexical borrowing often accompanies the introduction of new items and concepts through trade
and cultural contact between societies. However, contact scenarios are known where lexical
borrowing is avoided.

4.3.1 Limited borrowing from Austroasiatic into Indo-Aryan

We find surprisingly little evidence of Austroasiatic loanwords in Sanskrit (Anderson 2008, 4-5),
despite the fact that Munda speakers were local inhabitants of the subcontinent and therefore
likely to have extensive terminology for the flora and fauna of their South Asian environment.
The normal situation under such circumstances is for newcomers to fill lexical gaps by
borrowing local terms for previously unencountered animals, plants and other novel natural
phenomena. However, Thapar (1978, 152ff.) draws attention to the social divide that existed at
this time between the Aryans and conquered local tribes, who are referred to in the Ṛgveda as
dāsa/dasyu in generally pejorative terms. Language served to demarcate these two groups not
only in terms of social status, but also in terms of territory. The eastern frontier of the Gangetic
plain where non-Aryan languages were spoken was considered to be a ritually impure land and
their speakers were regarded as barbarians, so it is not surprising that there was resistance to
borrowing vocabulary from their substrate languages.

4.3.2 Borrowing in Mainland Southeast Asia

The sources of loanwords in the modern languages of MSEA reflect their individual histories of
language contact. For example, a massive number of Indic loanwords pervades modern Thai,
which Gedney (1947) estimates to be of comparable ubiquity to the number of Greek and Latin
loanwords in English. Many entered the language via translations of Pali Buddhist texts; others
were adopted wholesale from Khmer when their court practices and much of their culture were
adopted by Tai polities in the centuries after the fall of Angkor. Huffman (1986) identifies a large
number of these as spelling loans from Khmer, as the original Khmer orthography is preserved in
the Thai spelling. But while ‘bookish’ and technical loanwords are common (Court 1996b, 444),
we see very little widespread evidence of structural convergence with Indo-Aryan in the
languages of MSEA. This suggests that Sanskrit and later Pali were used is a limited religious

20
domain by a small elite of priests and monks, and that the Indic languages were not widely
spoken by a bilingual population.
One MSEA language demonstrating limited evidence suggestive of structural
convergence with Indic is modern Burmese, and the source was Theravada Buddhist scriptures
brought into the kingdom of Anorahta in the 11th century CE. Okell (1965) discusses how
Burmese translators created Nissaya grammars, in which each word of a line of Pali text was
matched with the corresponding Burmese word. This was intended not only to translate the text
into Burmese, but to familiarize the reader with the structure of Pali grammar. The result was the
diffusion of Indo-European grammatical features into the syntax of Burmese. One clear example
of this is the relative-correlative construction (e.g. whoever comes late, [he] will miss out on
lunch), which only develops in languages that are in contact with Indo-European. Non-Indo-
European languages of the region lack a relative pronoun word class, and so they fill this gap by
using their interrogative pronouns (for an example in Burmese, see Okell 1965, 209). Nissaya
texts have exerted a normative influence on Burmese and dominated early Western grammars of
the language (Okell 1965, 186-87).

4.3.3 Sinitic influence in Tai-Kadai

Language contact facilitated the sharing of large amounts of vocabulary by genetically unrelated
languages, which additionally obfuscated earlier attempts at linguistic classification. The
borrowing of Sino-Tibetan vocabulary by Tai languages, for example, was so extensive that it
was not until the mid-20th century that linguists could finally determine that Tai did not
constitute a branch of Sino-Tibetan. The impact of Sinitic on the modern languages of Southeast
Asia was intensified by the migration of Chinese from coastal areas of China, such as
Guangdong, Fujian and Hainan. This has resulted in sizeable populations of sea-born Cantonese,
Hakka, Hainanese, Hokkien, and Teochew speakers settling in coastal regions of Southeast Asia
over the past millennia and introducing many aspects of Sinitic culture.
Sinitic influence in the region is prominently represented by loan words in various
domains of cultural and commercial dominance. To illustrate, Thai has borrowed terms related to
cuisine, e.g. cɛɛ ‘Lenten fare’, bamìi ‘egg noodles’, ʔoolíaŋ ‘black iced coffee’; terms for
commerce, e.g. chéŋ ‘to settle (accounts), yîihɔ̂ɔ ‘brand’; and terms related to gaming, e.g. tǎw
‘dice’, hǔay ‘lottery’ (Coupe 2001, 739); even basic vocabulary such as numerals has been
adopted from Southern Min Sinitic languages, e.g. cɛ̀t ‘seven’, pɛ̀ɛt ‘eight’, kâw ‘nine’ and sìp
‘ten’.

4.3.4 Borrowing in Insular Southeast Asia

The advanced state of reconstruction of Austronesian and the availability of large comparative
databases offer a detailed glimpse into language contact in ISEA (Greenhill et al. 2008; Blust
2009; Blust and Trussel 2013). Languages of Southeast Asia have accumulated layers of
borrowed lexicon throughout the last three thousand years from the prominent languages of the
area. In chronological order of their influence, these languages were various stages of Old Malay,
possibly including proto-Malayic, followed by Sanskrit, Tamil, Malagasy, Indic, Persian, Arabic
and Tagalog.
Malay has had the most profound lexical influence in the area, both as a primary source
language, and as an intermediary for Sanskrit, Tamil, Indic, Persian, and Arabic. The influence of

21
Old Javanese, Malagasy and Tagalog is far more restricted. The discussion here is almost entirely
based on the data and comments in the Austronesian Comparative Dictionary (hereafter ACD,
Blust and Trussel 2013), and is limited in its scope by the ACD focus on Austronesian languages.
Robinson (2015) documents lexical borrowing between Austronesian and Papuan (Alor-
Pantar family) in Eastern Indonesia. The borrowed concepts include: (i) natural world: ‘flower’,
‘forest’, ‘garden’, ‘meat’, ‘path’, ‘salt’, ‘year’; (ii) plants: ‘bamboo’, ‘banana’, ‘betel nut’,
‘citrus’, ‘maize’, ‘papaya’; (iii) man-made objects: ‘axe’, ‘clothing’, ‘fishing hook’, ‘knife’,
‘machete’, ‘needle’, ‘rope’, ‘shirt’; (iv) animals: ‘bee’, ‘crocodile’, ‘deer’, ‘gecko’, ‘pig’; (v)
verbs and properties: ‘count’, ‘help’, ‘hide’, ‘hit’, ‘push’, ‘rub’, ‘sew’, ‘steal’, ‘wipe’; ‘blow’,
‘blunt’, ‘buy’, ‘come’, ‘dirty’, ‘speak’, ‘straight’, ‘tall’, ‘wrong’; and other items. Many of these
loans are widespread within the Alor-Pantar family and were borrowed several thousand years
ago. More comprehensive lexical resources document borrowing between Papuan or
Austroasiatic and Austronesian remain to be compiled.
The individual source languages and the most widely attested borrowings are discussed in
turn below. Malay loans are pervasive in the region; the ACD lists over 200 terms borrowed by
at least two other languages. The range of borrowed concepts is wide and encompasses
everything from the physical world, animals and plants, to terms related to culture, and trade.
Borrowings include nouns, verbs, property concepts, numerals and interjections. The most
widespread loans attested in at least ten Austronesian languages of the area, are:

(i) Physical world: bintaŋ ‘star’;

(ii) Spatial concepts: təpi ‘edge, rim’;
(iii) Plants: səntul ‘tree with edible fruit (Sandoricum indicum or Sandoricum koetjape)’, təroŋ
‘eggplant’, gambir ‘plant chewed with betel that invigorates’, bibit ‘seedling’, biji ‘seed’;
(iv) Animals: bébék ‘duck’, buroŋ ‘bird’, binataŋ ‘animal’, kambiŋ ‘goat’, kərbaw ‘water
buffalo, carabao’, berok ‘monkey sp. (Macacus Inuus nemestrinus)’;
(v) Substances: beléraŋ, beliraŋ ‘sulphur’, batu berani, besi berani ‘magnet’;
(vi) People and kin: (en)cék ‘Chinese’, kəmbar ‘twins’, boyot, buyut, moyot, poyot, piut ‘great
grandparent’, babu ‘maid, female servant’, kampoŋ ‘meeting, assembly, gathering’;
(vii) Properties: bodok ‘stupid’, bujaŋ ‘marriageable’, biru ‘blue’, bisu ‘mute’, kuniŋ ‘yellow’,
berséh ‘pure’, belisah ‘restless, fidgety’, tuŋgal ‘single’, haus ‘thirst, thirsty’;
(viii) Verbs: sepak ‘kick’, me-nəmpoh ‘attack suddenly, fall upon’, (h)ubah ‘change’, tiru
‘imitate, copy’, campur ‘mix’, jemput ‘pick up, take with fingers’, tarek ‘pull’;
(ix) Health: ubat ‘gunpowder, medicine’, burut ‘hernia’;
(x) Food: kuéh biŋka ‘rice cake’, budu ‘pickled fish’, kuah ‘broth, gravy’;
(xi) Culture and custom: surat ‘something written’, tulis ‘write’, sorak ‘exult, celebrate (as a
victory)’, ayo(h) ‘come on!, let’s go!’, puntianak ‘ghoul, vampire’;
(xii) Trade and governance: kuraŋ ‘lacking, less than’, jual ‘sell’, boroŋ ‘wholesale’, untoŋ
‘profit, gain, fortune, luck’, (h)ukur ‘measure’, baraŋ ‘goods, belongings, things,
possessions’, tageh ‘dunning to collect a debt’, takar ‘unit of measurement’, kira
‘approximately’, (h)atur ‘arrange, put in order’, tuŋgu ‘be attentive, stand guard’, -belas
‘teens’;
(xiii) Tools and technology: kətam ‘carpenter’s plane’, hobat, ubat ‘gunpowder, medicine’,
paraŋ ‘machete, bush knife’, antéh, meŋ-antéh ‘spin cotton thread’, sumbu ‘wick’, pondok
‘hut, shack’, bedok ‘drum’, taji ‘artificial cockspur’, antiŋ ‘earring’, bedak ‘powder, face
powder’.

22
 The loans are mostly found in the languages of Malay trading partners located in coastal
areas and along the estuaries of large rivers. Some are attested as far away as the Australian Top
End languages of Arnhem Land and the north coast of New Guinea (Seiler 1985), where Malay
and Makassarese were lingue franche in the pre-colonial period (Urry and Walsh 1981; Walker
and Zorc 1981; Evans 1992).
Languages that were directly affected by Sanskrit influence are Malay, Javanese, Batak
and Balinese. Sanskrit influence elsewhere was usually mediated through Malay (Adelaar 1996).
Indonesian possesses a great number of Sanskrit loanwords, and Old Malay inscriptions
document the profound Indian cultural and religious influence. Zoetmulder and Robson report
that almost half of the 25 thousand entries in their Old Javanese dictionary go back directly or
indirectly to a Sanskrit original (1982, ix).
The World Loanword Database documents the spread of 592 Sanskrit words into various
Southeast Asian languages (Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009). The actual number is of course
higher. Indian linguistic and cultural influence was a result of peaceful religious conversion
(Hinduism, Buddhism, and later also Islam). Lexical borrowing had a major impact and enriched
the semantic fields of religion, rites and law, medicine, botany, architecture, numeral
terminology, time and abstract notions, and also contributed proper names and place names
(Gonda 1952/1973).
The most widespread Sanskrit loans (attested in ten or more languages) are (i) substances:
kārpāsa कापा$स ‘cotton’, cukra च( ु ‘vinegar’, (ii) military terms: koṭa कोट ‘fortress,
fortification’, through Mly. binasa from bhid +भ- ‘destroy’, (iii) culture and religion terms: Mly.
biasa, from abhyasta अ/य1त ‘accustomed’, āgama आगम ‘religion’, buddhi ब-
ु 7ध ‘conscience,
mind, insight’, āśā आशा ‘hope’, śīla शील ‘sit deferentially’, vidyādharī <व-याधर? ‘nymph’, vṛtta
वत
ृ ‘news’, sākṣin साABन ् ‘witness’, (iv) language-related terms: vicāra <वचार ‘discussion’, Mly.
tabek from Skt. kṣantabya BाEतFय ‘to be pardoned; may I be pardoned; pardon me’ came to
mean ‘excuse oneself/greeting’ in various languages, athavā अथवा ‘or/either’, pūjā पूजा ‘praise’,
(v) trade-related terms: Mly. emas ‘gold’ probably Skt. muṣka मुJक ‘testicle > mace, nutmeg’,
tāmra ताK ‘copper-gold alloy’, hasta ह1त ‘ell (measure unit)’, vaṇij वMणज ् ‘trade/commerce’,
artha आथ$ ‘wealth/possessions’, (vi) governance and technology related terms: vyaya Oयय
‘tax/toll’, paryaṅka पय$Pक ‘palanquin’, Mly. panday possibly from bhaṇḍila भिRडल
‘blacksmith’, and (vii) pāravata पारवत ‘pigeon, dove (domesticated)’ with the widely borrowed
co-lexification of ‘power’ and ‘venom’ of the Skt. viṣa <वष ‘power, venom’. The actual forms in
individual languages bear a formal resemblance to Malay, though which they diffused. Finally,
Old Malay, Old Javanese, and Madurese borrowed retroflex consonants from Sanskrit (Adelaar
1996, 696), which in turn were previously borrowed by Sanskrit from Dravidian languages.
Old Javanese was a source of many loanwords that were typically first borrowed into
Malay and probably also Malagasy (Sander Adelaar, p.c.) and then spread through them to other
languages (Adelaar 1994). Widely distributed are (i) animal names: warak ‘rhinoceros’, ajaran
‘horse’, bañak ‘goose’, banṭèŋ ~ banṭyaŋ ‘wild ox’, (ii) food items: santan ‘coconut cream’,

23
sambəl ‘spicy condiment side dish with rice’, (iii) trade-related terms: *tarima ‘receive, accept’,
as-si-simpən ‘save, in safekeeping’, hinten ‘diamond’, waliraŋ ‘sulphur’, sabuk ‘loincloth’, kəris
~ kris ‘dagger’, and (iv) religious terms: a-cemer ‘defiled/ritually polluted/ ceremonially
unclean’, səmbah ‘prayer/worship’, and aji ‘incantation, holy writ’.
Various Chinese loans were spread through trade, but probably only during the voyages of
the early Ming period (after 1368, during the reign of Yongle Emperor). Examples from
Southeast Asian languages include waŋkaŋ ‘Chinese junk’, uaŋ ‘money’, hupaw ‘money-belt’,
and hunsuy ‘smoking pipe’ (Blust 2009, 19). The word guntiŋ ‘scissors’ may be of Chinese
origin as well, and its distribution in over 90 languages is documented in ACD (Blust and Trussel
2013).
The influence of Arabic on the lexicons of various Southeast Asian languages is mediated
through Malay, for which it is well documented. Jones (1978) lists about 4,500 Arabic loanwords
for Malay. A more conservative estimate by the Indonesian Etymological Project led by the same
scholar lists about 2,800 Arabic words (Jones 2008).
Arabic words come consistently from the literary variety of Arabic. Jones (2008, xxiii)
suggest that the Indian traders were the main vector in the transmission of Arabic and Persian
loanwords into Malay. The most widespread forms (attested in at least 10 languages, and most
likely borrowed through Malay) fall into the following domains:
(i) Law: hukum (‫ ﺣﻜﻢ‬ḥukm) ‘judge, punish’, dawa (‫ ٮﺪﻋﻮ‬daʿawa) ‘accusation, blame, litigation’,
waris (‫ إﺮث‬irṭ) ‘heir, inheritance’;
(ii) Religion: asar (‫ ﻋﺼﺮ‬ʿaṣr) ‘afternoon prayer’, berkat (‫ ﺑﺮﻛﺔ‬baraka) ‘blessing’, bilal ‘religious
official’, amal (‫ لﺎﻤﻋأ‬ʿamal ‘act, work’) ‘works of piety/charity’
(ii) Substances: arak (‫ قﺮﻋ‬ʿaraq ‘sweat, perspiration, liquor’) ‘alcohol’, ambar (‫ ﺒﺮﻋﻨ‬ʿanbar)
‘ambergris’, apiun (‫ نﻮﻓﯿأ‬afyūn) ‘opium’;
(iv) Reasoning: asal (‫ ﺻﻞأ‬aṣl ‘root, trunk, descend, lineage’) ‘origin, cause, provided that’, akal
(‫ ﺻﻞأ‬ʿaql ‘sense, reason, understanding, mind’) ‘intelligence, craft, scheme’, hasil (‫ ﺻﻞأ‬ḥāṣil
‘result, outcome, sum, total, income, revenue’) ‘title, yield, results’.
Arabic romanisation and senses cited in the brackets above are based on Wehr and Cowan
(1980). As it is common with lexical borrowing, the recipient language usually borrows just a
single sense of a word. Indeed, the Arabic source words typically have multiple senses.
Tagalog was the main recipient of Malay loans in the Philippine archipelago. Loanwords
were introduced through a Malay trading colony in Manila Bay, where Tagalog was spoken
(Blust and Trussel 2013). Manila Bay’s central position in the archipelago probably facilitated
the diffusion of a number of Tagalog words into other Philippine languages. Except for a number
of trade items (machete, axe, fish hook), these loanwords do not display any clear pattern. Many
loans introduced through Malay, including those from Javanese and other languages, spread
through Tagalog to the northern Philippines, which were beyond the reach of the Malay trading
network (Blust and Trussel 2013). Similarly, Tagalog mediated the spread of Spanish loanwords.
Loanwords in southern Taiwan probably found their way there through Tagalog as well, when its
speakers accompanied the Spanish during their brief occupation of the area.

5 Conclusion

South and Southeast Asia are defined by their natural boundaries – the Arabian Sea and Indian
Ocean in the west, the Pacific Ocean in the east, and the Himalayan range in the north. The entire
region is heavily influenced by the prevailing monsoonal patterns, which have historically

24
determined agricultural practices, trade networks, and the spread of people and their languages.
The present distribution reflects the expansions of early agriculturists. Limited by natural
obstacles (mountains, rainforests, seas, wind patterns) and guided by natural gateways (river
systems, island chains, straits), the expanding agriculturists migrated into areas suitable for
cultivation and often developed symbiotic relationships with maritime people. The residual areas,
such as Zomia in MSEA, retained a greater diversity of languages and lifestyles than the
lowlands and plains, where early civilizations based on intensive agriculture waxed and waned.
By the start of our era, South and Southeast Asia had become intimately linked with the
Arabic and Sinitic worlds. Southeast Asia functioned as the heart of this global trade network,
providing valuable commodities both within the region and beyond to distant shores. Vivid
cultural and commercial exchange flourished prior to the arrival of the European colonial powers
in the 16th century, who contributed merely the latest layer of colour on the linguistically and
culturally rich canvas of the region.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors contributed equally to the writing of this article; names are listed in alphabetical
order. The chapter has benefited greatly from comments and discussions with Sander Adelaar,
Leonard Andaya, Kingsley Bolton, Gérard Diffloth, Hans Heinrich Hock, Jiří Jákl, Tom
Hoogervorst, Marian Klamer, Ivan Panović, Felix Rau and Reinoud Veenhof. Kratochvíl
gratefully acknowledges the support of the European Regional Development Fund-Project
"Sinophone Borderlands – Interaction at the Edges" CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000791;
Coupe’s contribution was made possible by an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for
Experienced Researchers, and the support of the Institute for Linguistics at the University of
Cologne.

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