Detecting pre-modern lexical influence from South India in Maritime Southeast Asia

Abstract

Commercial and cultural links between South India and Maritime Southeast Asia have been strong and regular since antiquity. This paper adds a linguistic dimension to our understanding of ancient interethnic contact in the region through an exploration of the hitherto poorly understood lexical contributions from Dravidian languages, such as Tamil and Malayāḷam, to the languages of Maritime Southeast Asia. First, the sound changes are addressed that loanwords undergo upon their adoption into West-Malayo-Polynesian languages. The paper continues by postulating examples of respectively Tamil loans attested in the Old Javanese literature, loanwords from Malayāḷam, and Tamil loans not attested in early literature but borrowed across a wide geographical range, including the Philippines and Madagascar, which would attest to their pre-colonial transmission. The paper then examines the issue of Indo-Aryan loanwords in the languages of Southeast Asia that were transmitted through speakers of Dravidian languages, addressing the sound correspondences we may expect in such a scenario. Cumulatively, it is argued that linguistic influence from South India was considerable, providing a novel line of evidence to reconstruct the past of the Bay of Bengal.