| Sunda-Sulawesi
Inner Hesperonesian
Inner Western Malayo-Polynesian |
|
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution: |
Southern Thailand, southern Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia and Micronesia |
| Genetic classification: |
Austronesian Paiwanic Malayo-Polynesian (MP) Nuclear MP Sunda-Sulawesi |
| Subdivisions: |
15 branches (provisional)
|
 The Sunda-Sulawesi languages (red). Not shown: Chamorro. The languages in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Hainan are Chamic languages, and those of coastal Burma and Thailand are Moklen languages. The excluded areas of Malaya are Aslian languages, and those of Borneo and Sulawesi are Borneo-Philippine languages. |
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The Sunda-Sulawesi languages (also known as Inner Hesperonesian or Inner Western Malayo-Polynesian languages) are a putative branch of the Austronesian family posited in Wouk and Ross (2002). They include most of the languages of Sulawesi and the Greater Sunda Islands, as well as a few outliers such as Chamorro and Palauan.
In this proposal the previously posited clade of Western Malayo-Polynesian (WMP), aka Hesperonesian, has been broken up into "inner" (Sunda-Sulawesi) and "outer" (Borneo-Philippines) clades, and Western Malayo-Polynesian is considered merely a geographic term.
The greatest diversity of languages is on the island of Sulawesi, the likely homeland of the Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian languages. However, the group has not been taken up by other historical linguists, and it may be that Sunda-Sulawesi is itself not a genealogical clade, but simply the Nuclear MP languages outside Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (assuming the latter is a valid group, which is not clear).
Not all the languages of Sulawesi belong to the Sunda-Sulawesi (Inner Hesperonesian) clade. The twenty languages of the northern peninsula of Sulawesi and neighboring islands to the north are instead part of the Borneo-Philippines branch (Outer Hesperonesian).
Classification
There are a number of small clusters of languages in the Sunda-Sulawesi family whose interrelationship remains uncertain. Grouped by geography, they are:
(Central and southern Sulawesi)
- Celebic
- South Sulawesi (includes Buginese)
(Greater Sunda Islands)
- Northwest Sumatran (north-central Sumatra and the Mentawai Islands)
- Rejang (southwest Sumatra)
- Lampungic (southeast Sumatra)
- Javanese (central Java)
- Malayo-Sumbawan (languages of Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and Vietnam, incl. Malay, Sundanese, and Balinese)
(Pacific islands)
- Palauan (Palau)
- Chamorro (Mariana Islands, including Guam)
References
- Fay Wouk and Malcolm Ross (ed.), The history and typology of western Austronesian voice systems. Australian National University, 2002.
- K. Alexander Adelaar and Nikolaus Himmelmann, The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar. Routledge, 2005.
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