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. Administratively, it forms the largest island in the East Nusa Tenggara Province. The area is 14,250 km2. Including Komodo and Rinca islands ...

, one of the

Lesser Sunda Islands The Lesser Sunda Islands (, , ), now known as Nusa Tenggara Islands (, or "Southeast Islands"), are an archipelago in the Indonesian archipelago. Most of the Lesser Sunda Islands are located within the Wallacea region, except for the Bali pro ...

in the eastern half of

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...

. The speech area of the Central Flores languages is bordered to the west by the Manggarai language, 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 (Bajawa, Central, So'a) * Kéo *

Nage The Nage are an indigenous people living on the eastern Indonesian islands of Flores (chiefly in the eponymous Nagekeo Regency), and Timor. They are descended from the indigenous population of Flores They are largely assimilated by the neighbor ...

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

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 constituents in a clause. The standard examples of grammatical functions from traditional g ...

s are mostly expressed by word order. For example, in Rongga, there is strict

SVO word order SVO may refer to: * Association football clubs in Germany: ** SVO Germaringen ** SV Oberachern * Silver vanadium oxide battery (SVO battery) * San Jose Chamber of Commerce, a chamber of commerce in San Jose, California, United States, known as th ...

: () 'that horse kick(ed) me'. Possession is expressed by placing the possessor after the possessed noun: () 'my mother'.

Prehistory

According to McWhorter (2010, 2011, 2019), the extreme isolating character of the Central Flores languages is the result of

language shift Language shift, also known as language transfer, 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 perceived ...

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 form of contact language 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 f ...

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), who proposes that the isolating character can better be explained by a

pre-Austronesian The Austronesian people, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples who have settled in Taiwan, maritime Southeast Asia, parts of mainland Southeast Asia, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea, Island Melanesi ...

substrate Substrate may refer to: Physical layers *Substrate (biology), the natural environment in which an organism lives, or the surface or medium on which an organism grows or is attached ** Substrate (aquatic environment), the earthy material that exi ...

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. There remains to explain why the

ikat ''Ikat'' (literally "to bind" in Malayo-Polynesian languages) is a dyeing technique from Southeast Asia used to pattern textiles that employs resist dyeing on the yarns prior to dyeing and weaving the fabric. In Southeast Asia, where it is th ...

from Ngadha are the only such Floresian textiles to bear distinctive motifs of stick figures such as what may be encountered in prehistoric imaging; and what to make of the legends that talk of living side by side with some 'little people' until only a few centuries ago - said legends being very strong still in central Flores, less so in the west and inexistent in the east, a repartition which indicates a population movement of outsiders coming from the west.

References

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