The Central Flores languages (also called Ngadha–Lio) are a subgroup of the Austronesian language family. They are spoken in the central part of

Flores Flores is one of the Lesser Sunda Islands, a group of islands in the eastern half of Indonesia. Including the Komodo Islands off its west coast (but excluding the Solor Archipelago to the east of Flores), the land area is 15,530.58 km2, and th ...

, one of the

Lesser Sunda Islands The Lesser Sunda Islands or nowadays known as Nusa Tenggara Islands ( id, Kepulauan Nusa Tenggara, formerly ) are an archipelago in Maritime Southeast Asia, north of Australia. Together with the Greater Sunda Islands to the west they make up t ...

in the eastern half of

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

. The speech area of the Central Flores languages is bordered to the west by the

Manggarai language The Manggarai language (, id, bahasa Manggarai) is the language of the Manggarai people from the western parts of the island of Flores, in East Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia. Background Manggarai is the native language of the Manggarai p ...

, and to the east by the Sikka language. __TOC__

Languages

The Central Flores subgroup comprises the following languages, from west to east (with subvarieties): * Rongga * Namut and Nginamanu *

Ngadha Ngadha (, previously spelled Ngada) is an Austronesian language, one of six languages spoken in the central stretch of the Indonesian island of Flores. From west to east these languages are Ngadha, Nage, Keo, Ende, Lio, and Palu'e. These langu ...

(Bajawa, Central, So'a) * Kéo *

Nage The Nage are an indigenous people living on the eastern Indonesian island of Flores and Timor. They descended from the indigenous population of Flores They are largely assimilated by the neighboring people. They speak Nage, one of the major lan ...

(Central, East) * Nga'o (West, East) * Ende *

Lio Vanda Maria Ribeiro Furtado Tavares de Vasconcelos (born 17 June 1962), known professionally as Lio, is a Portuguese-Belgian singer and actress who was a pop icon in France and Belgium during the 1980s. Life and career Vanda Maria Ribeiro Furt ...

Grammar

Unlike most other Austronesian languages, the Central Flores languages are highly isolating. They completely lack derivational and inflectional morphemes, and core

grammatical relation In linguistics, grammatical relations (also called grammatical functions, grammatical roles, or syntactic functions) are functional relationships between Constituent (linguistics), constituents in a clause. The standard examples of grammatical fun ...

s are mostly expressed by word order. E.g. in Rongga, there is strict

SVO word order SVO may refer to: * Saturn Valley Online, an EarthBound MMORPG * Sheremetyevo International Airport, one three major airports serving Moscow, Russia, IATA Airport Code * Social value orientations, a psychological construct * Sparse voxel octree, an ...

: ''jara ndau kenda ja'o'' (horse that kick I) "that horse kick(ed) me". Possession is expressed by placing the possessor after the possessed noun ''ine ja'o'' (mother I) "my mother".

Prehistory

According to McWhorter (2019), the extreme isolating character of the Central Flores languages is the result of

language shift Language shift, also known as language transfer or language replacement or language assimilation, is the process whereby a speech community shifts to a different language, usually over an extended period of time. Often, languages that are perceiv ...

through "heavy adult acquisition", which means that adult populations which originally spoke completely different languages shifted to a language ancestral to the Central Flores languages, but dropped all derivational and inflectional morphology. This process is characteristic for the development of

pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from s ...

s and creoles, most of which display strong simplification of the source language. McWhorter's (2019) hypothesis of adult acquisition and subsequent creolization is dismissed by Elias (2020). Instead, he proposes that the isolating character can better be explained by a

pre-Austronesian The Austronesian peoples, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples in Taiwan, Maritime Southeast Asia, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar that speak Austrone ...

substrate language, which must have had the typological features of the Mekong-Mamberamo area. Elias (2020) estimates that the switch would have taken place around 2,500–1,500 BCE.

References

{{Languages of Indonesia Languages of Indonesia Central Malayo-Polynesian languages Flores Island (Indonesia)