ABOUT BOOK

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.