Raja Ampat at the edge of Southeast Asia: Macro-perspectives on micro-histories

The Raja Ampat archipelago, just off the northwest tip of New Guinea, lies at a major biological and cultural threshold between Island Southeast Asia and Melanesia. The islands were an early entry point for the first human settlers of New Guinea some 50,000 years ago, and later for Austronesian migrations into Melanesia beginning around 3,500 years ago. For several millennia, Raja Ampat has linked diverse language and culture groups, functioning as a point of articulation for regional and global forces of trade, marriage, and migration. As such, the archipelago offers a particularly rich setting for studies of language contact and change, where fine-grained local histories can inform broader questions of cultural and linguistic evolution.

In this talk, I address these broad questions through a detailed examination of word prosody in the Raja Ampat languages. Today, the endemic languages of the archipelago are all Austronesian. Unusually for the family, these languages all have lexical tone, and a subset additionally have a highly unusual combination of tone and lexical stress. Taking a bottom-up approach, I show that tonogenesis occurred at least twice in Raja Ampat, in both cases via mechanisms involving interactions between vowel quality and stress. The multiple innovations of tone in such close geographic proximity suggests contact with a tonal substrate—no longer spoken in the archipelago—may have played a role. Building on recent work by Yakpo (2021) on word-prosodic development in Afro-European creoles, I argue that the divergent paths that the word-prosodic systems in Raja Ampat have taken reflect different social relationships with this substrate, thus offering new insights into deep contact histories in Raja Ampat and the wider region.