Concealment, Maintenance and Renaissance: language and ethnicity in the Moluccan community in the Netherlands Aone van Engelenhoven

From a comparative linguistic point of view, the islands can be regrouped into four ethnolinguistic zones, according to the mutual genetic relationships of the indigenous languages. The northern two subdistricts form one ethnolinguistic zone, where languages are either Austronesian (the South Halmaheran-West New-Guinean branch, Blust 1978) or non-Austronesian isolates (Voorhoeve 1987). The present paper focuses on languages found in the remaining three zones. Except for the non-Austronesian Oirata isolect on Kisar (SW Maluku), they all belong to an early off-branch of Proto-Austronesian, labelled Central Malayo-Polynesian (Blust 1993).