Page 165 - THE MELANESIA DIASPORA FILE CETAK ISI 10022017

the Solomon Islands, East Timor and Vanuatu, constitute a linguistic area, separate from
neighboring territories, or that the majority of languages there are part of a language
family which can be distinguished from Austronesian. In fact, linguistic analysis shows that,
whatever differences in culture and history, the majority of languages in these countries
belong to the Austrnonesian language family. The term Melanesia, therefore, is best
used to describe a geographical region and a sub-regional culture of Oceania, but should
not be used to refer to a linguistic area or a language family. The linguistic situation is
therefore best seen as a multilingual situation with languages from two language families,
Austronesian and Non-Austronesian.
The Austronesian language family is a language family with the widest distribution
in the world, stretching from Madagascar in the west to Tahiti in the east. The ancestral
homeland of the Austronesians is in Taiwan. Several thousand years ago, the early
Austronesians dispersed southward from Taiwan through the Philippines and further
through Kalimantan and Sulawesi, and then occupying the larger islands in the South,
Sumatra, Java, with a clear migratory trend from west to east, eventually occupying all of
the Indonesian archipelago. Subsequently, they travelled across the Pacific, moving from
island chain to island chain until they had expanded to Hawai’i in the north, New Zealand
in the South, and Easter Island in the east. During the Austronesian expansion, they came
in contact with the Non-Austronesian people, whose ancestors had arrived much earlier.
Over thousands of years, Austronesians and Non-Austronesians were in contact and
linguistic study shows how languages and cultures changed, adapted, borrowed, migrated
further, prospered and declined. The result is that the Non-Austronesians, who formerly
were found all over the archipelago, became concentrated in the east of Indonesia. But
the geographical distribution is more like a patchwork than a clear divide, and mixing and
intermarrying led to further coming together of the two peoples over long periods of time.
If we look at language areas, the picture is not one of two large, clearly demarcated
linguistic territories. It is rather more nuanced, with a complex patchwork of multilingualism,
shaped by space and by time, and by contacts and accommodation over millennia. Within
this complex geographical linguistic picture, the individual identities of languages, are also
nuanced, the result of contact, change, and borrowing. Linguistics can reveal the larger
patterns in this highly diverse mixture and can help us trace historical origins.
One striking finding from linguistics is that the countries which identify themselves as
Melanesian have higher concentrations of Austronesian language use than in Indonesia. If
we look at the number of Austronesian languages in each country expressed as a percentage

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