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 Indonesia. 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 language, 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 morphological 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 exhibit
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, borrowing from Austronesian has not been intense, and contact
with Malay and Indonesian is a relatively recent phenomenon in most of
the Alor-Pantar region.
