Voice in Malay/Indonesian

Abstract

This paper considers the question of the extent to which Malay/Indonesian dialects manifest a voice system similar to the so-called “Philippine-type”, “symmetric” voice systems (the voice system reconstructed for Proto-Austronesian and still found in the Philippine languages, Malagasy, Seediq and many other Western Austronesian languages). We examine in detail, from a pan-Austronesian perspective, the voice systems found in five Malay/Indonesian dialects, prescriptive Standard Indonesian (SI), three Malay varieties spoken in the Malay heartland of Sumatra, BasA Selangon (BS), Sarang Lan Malay (SL), Mudung Darat Malay (MD) and the Malay of the city of Kuching in Sarawak (KM). The syntax of voice in the various colloquial Malay dialects is described as falling out from the interaction of the syntax of phases and a morphological constraint preventing the extraction of constituents which have morphosyntactic properties that conflict with those of the first constituent extracted, a choice which determines the voice of the clause. We observe a cline of erosion of the original Philippine-type voice system across the various colloquial dialects.