INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES AND LANGUAGES OF SARAWAK, MALAYSIA

The description of the state of the art of Sarawak Indigenous communities and their languages as presented in this volume has two parameters the historical and the contemporary. These parameters are attributes of the four domains of investigation undertaken: history of migration, population study, lexicostatistic subgrouping, and typology of systems and structures. All these domains make use of contemporary data, most which are products of the authors’ field research.

Sarawak indigenous landscape has changed from single ethnolinguistic communities of the past to regions with a number of ethnolinguistic groups living together, a situation brought about by the opening of new regions with industries that offer jobs. Lexicostatistic subgrouping of these indigenous languages results in nine major subfamilies, and a number of sub-subfamilies being branches of the major ones. Most of these languages are still unwritten and their morphology is of the simple agglutinative type. The few that have been put to writing have shown an increase in the use of agglutination for the derivation of new expressions. Hence, this book is meant not only for linguists but also for a wider circle of readers whose field of study or whose general interest is knowledge of the Indigenous peoples of Sarawak and their languages.