ABSTRACT
Concepts like language family and Sprachareal have been suggested and they may help bring some order for an overview of local language habitats. Current inbound work migrations such as from the Philippines or from Indonesia or southern India into Malaysia intersect with local languages but lead to ethnolects at best. In language shift, large numbers of people learn the superstrate language as adults and as multilinguals. Factors of both adults second-language learning and of multilingual speech contribute to the transformation of a language through contact. Many traditional language habitats have had a hierarchical social structure in that some languages like Thai, Malay or Laotian and Sanskrit or Arabic had a distinct prestige over others. Tonality divides Southeast Asia (SEA) language families into tonal and non-tonal languages. Political domination brought Sanskrit and other Indian languages to the north of SEA and to Malaya very early and then remained dominant languages for centuries.
