Page:An introduction to Indonesian linguistics, being four essays.djvu/5

 PREFACE The Indonesian languages constitute the western division of the great Austronesian (or Malayo-Polynesian, or Oceanic) family of speech, which extends over a vast portion of the earth's surface, but has an almost entirely insular domain, reaching as it does from Madagascar, near the coast of Africa, to Easter Island, an outlying dependency of South America, and from Formosa and Hawaii in the North to New Zealand in the South. The whole family is of great interest and im- portance from the Linguistic point of view and can fairly claim to rank with the great famihes of speech, such as the Indo- European, the Semitic, the Ural-Altaic, the Tibeto- Chinese, etc. Though but a small part of its area falls on the mainland of Asia, there is no reasonable doubt that it is of genuinely Asiatic origin, and of late years it has been linked up with another Asiatic family, which includes a number of the languages of India and Indo-China {e.g., Munda, Khasi, Mon, Khmer, Nicobarese, Sakai, etc.). The Indonesian division of the Austronesian family is the part that has best preserved the traces of its origin, and it forms therefore an essential clue to the study of the family as a whole. It has also been more thoroughly investigated than the other two divisions — viz., the Micronesian and Melanesian group and the Polynesian.

The Indonesian languages cover practically the whole area of Indonesia (otherwise called the Eastern, or Indian, or Malay, Archipelago, which includes the Phihppines and ex-tends from the north-western point of Sumatra to New Guinea), together with the whole of Madagascar, the greater part of the Malay Peninsula, the Mergui Archipelago ofE the coast of Tenasserim, some outlying tracts in Eastern Indo- China (which region there is much ground for regarding as Rh