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Foraging and the history of languages in the Malay Peninsula

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Author

Editor

  • Tom Güldemann
  • Patrick McConvell
  • Richard A. Rhodes

Summary, in English

The hunter-gatherer groups of Southeast Asia represent a diverse range of adaptations. The so-called Negritos of the Andaman Islands, the Malay Peninsula and the Philippines have attracted particular attention because of long-standing claims that they represent traces of pre-agricultural Southeast Asia. Research on Andaman and Philippine prehistory has tended to maintain at least some components of this view. Research on Malayan prehistory, however, has in recent decades taken a different course, proposing that the local Semang foragers represent a physical and economic adaptation in response to Neolithic and later events. This perspective developed alongside a general revisionist trend in anthropology which questioned the notion of hunter-gatherers as static relics of prehistory. The Malayan argument, inspired by a complex local situation of language–culture–biology relations, relied heavily on historical-linguistic reconstruction of the Aslian branch of Austroasiatic (Aslian languages are spoken by most aboriginal groups in the Malay Peninsula, including all of the Semang foragers). Recent genetic studies cast doubt on this Malayan perspective, suggesting instead a robust connection between the Semang foragers and the local pre-Neolithic population. In the present chapter I review the Malayan debate and, in light of new genetic and linguistic insights, outline a reinterpretation of the linguistic prehistory of the Malay Peninsula. Issues of language history, contact, change and shift are set against a proposed niche of hunting-gathering, in an effort to explain the current language identities and characteristics of the Semang foragers.

Publishing year

2020-02

Language

English

Pages

164-197

Publication/Series

The Language of Hunter-Gatherers

Document type

Book chapter

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Topic

  • General Language Studies and Linguistics

Status

Published

Project

  • Digital Multimedia Archive of Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage Phase II: Seeding Multidisciplinary Workspaces
  • Language as key to perceptual diversity: an interdisciplinary approach to the senses

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISBN: 9781139026208
  • ISBN: 9781107003682