LANGUAGES FROM SOUTHEAST ASIA

ROAMING OCEANIA: ECAI LINGUISTIC ATLAS

ON AUSTRONESIA
Presented Nov 7th, 2003
Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC)
Conference and Joint Meetings
Cultural Heritage and
Collaboration in the Digital Age

Work on the
Austronesian Atlas for
Languages and Cultures
in Monsoon Asia
David Blundell

Introduction
This work stems from the Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC)
established in the early 1990s. It is based on digital museum projects
concerning linguistics, prehistory, and ethnology, as an Oceania
cultural virtual museum. Over the past few years, groups from the
University of California, Berkeley (UCB), and others are setting up
teams of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), to connect
areas of the world through digital geographical information systems
(GIS). From these shared projects, scholars have unified a
technical information network with parameters to chart global spatial
temporal data. The initiative is to link geographical sectors
of the world as modular areas of research.

This Atlas
The digital cultural atlas for Austronesian speakers is a vast region.
Spatial layers of information are marked in time from prehistory
and up One layer is based on information of the Language atlas of the
Pacific Area (Wurm and Hattori 1981 and 1983). to the present as
continuous work from mutual research
serving as an academic bulletin board on the Internet for scholarly
exchange from Southeast Asia across Oceania.
Currently I am working at Academia Sinica, Institute of Linguistics,
and a similar university institutes in Taiwan in terms of conducting
linguistic field studies and research on Austronesian languages.
Regions of Monsoon Asia are undergoing mapping. Hainan is being
looked at for linguistic verification on the present state of
Austronesian languages.

Monsoon Asia

Petrus Plancicus (1595)

The earliest evidence of the

Austronesian linguistic
family points to Taiwan and
the surrounding islands.
These people have different
cultures proving them with
specialized means of coexisting with the natural
environment.Ubersichtskarte
produced in Germany (1858).

A Japanese map
(1901) shows a
line in red as
boundary between
dividing Han
people (left) from
the indigenous
communities.

The projects that I will present here dwell on current thoughts on

heritage as a resource for development and the tools of maintaining
heritage for communicating information for public awareness and
research utility. Such projects include the professional management
of regional heritage sites and a regional component language atlas
of Austronesia based on geo-referenced data for spatio-temporal
information storage and retrieval from maps.

The Batanes Islands

These islands are between the Philippines and Taiwan in the Bashi
Channel where the Malayo-Polynesian Batanic languages are
spoken. Yami is spoken in the region of Taiwan on a separate isle.

Taiwan in Relation to the Batanes Islands

of the Philippines 1900

Taiwan in Relation to the Batanes Islands of the Philippines

Publications
The book Austronesian Taiwan: Linguistics, History, Ethnology,
Prehistory (2000) published by the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of
Anthropology, UC Berkeley, and the Shung Ye Museum of
Formosan Aborigines is now entering its second edition. This
resource will serve as the basis for an e-formatted publication coedited with Jeanette Zerneke to serialize the edition with linguistics
coming first. The Formosan Language time enabled maps
accomplished by Paul Li and Eric Yen at Academia Sinica will serve
as the basis for this part with links from the data, such as dictionaries
and linguistic articles referenced to spatial/temporal designation.

A map (2000) produced

by Paul Li giving historic
linguistic boundaries
in the publication
Austronesian Taiwan:
Linguistics, History,
Ethnology, Prehistory.

Diaspora
Diaspora of the Austronesian Language Family has created a
linguistic arena of geography that extends from Taiwan to the
Chilean territory of Easter Island, from Borneo to Madagascar.
This is by far the largest linguistic determining factor throughout
Southeast Asia yet primarily of the archipelagos from Myanmar
to Cambodia, Vietnam, Hainan, the Philippines, Indonesia out to
Melanesia (New Guinea), Malaysia. The coastal areas where the
sea nomads reside from the Andaman Sea to the Celebes have
traditionally maintained Austronesian languages. Malay is a
gloss or lingua franca as a trade language from the Thai border
to the reaches of Indonesia with millions of speakers. Javanese is
said to have 70 to 80 million speakers. Yet most Austronesian
languages have only a few thousand speakers at most.

A series of maps edited in two volumes by Stephen Wurm and Shiro

Hattori 1981 [Part 1] and 1983 [Part 2] as the Language Atlas of
the Pacific Area (The Australian Academy of the Humanities in
Collaboration with the Japan Academy. Canberra: The Australian
National University) provide a layer of reference for Austronesian
language spatial data.
Thanks to the people in Australia, especially Prof Crissman, the
support from Academia Sinica at the Computing Center and Institute
of Linguistics (Preparatory Office), ECAI Central and its
community of scholarly exchange, the following maps were done
to give a clear and working picture of the Austronesian Diaspora
in Southeast Asia is being completed.

Spatial data partially based on

Wurm and Hattori, eds. 1981and 1983

Language spatial
information for Western
Malay-Polynesian in
Sumatra and the Malay
Peninsula based on Wurm
and Hattori, eds.

Language spatial
information for Western
Malay-Polynesian from
Java to Timor based on
Wurm and Hattori, eds.

Philippines spatial information based on Wurm and Hattori, eds. 1981

with data attributes in digital format prepared by Academia Sinica

Language information
for the Philippines
as a test prepared by
the School of Information
Management & Systems
and ECAI Central at Cal.

Other source projects in Taiwan working on Formosan languages:

Institute of Linguistic (Preparatory Office), Academia Sinica
Academia Sinica Institution Project of National Digital Archives
Project, Digital Archives of Formosan Aborigines, Languages
Council of Indigenous Peoples, Executive Yuan, ROC
Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines, Taipei
To name a few with new institutions being established in local
schools, cultural centers, and universities, such the Program for
Austronesian Languages at the recently established Institute of
Linguistics, National Taitung University in Southeast Taiwan.

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David Blundell, ed. Berkeley, CA: Phoebe A. Hearst Museum,
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Blundell, David
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Wurm, Stephen A., and Shiro Hattori

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