The eastern edge of Southeast Asia?: a linguistic area seen from its fringe

Abstract

We address the question of the categoriality of Southeast Asia as a linguistic area by examining a language that can be argued to be on its very fringe, Iha. Iha is spoken on the western edge of New Guinea, and participates in many ways in the typological norms of the New Guinea mainland. It is, however, very much an outlier in the linguistic milieu in which it is found, with a number of languages of the Onin peninsula showing characteristics more typical of (mainland) Southeast Asia; indeed, in some ways even Iha shows features that would be at home in Southeast Asia. We discuss the linguistic features that have been used to characterise Southeast Asia as a linguistic area, and compare their distribution across the archipelago that separates Iha from the Asian mainland. We discuss the need to examine different kinds of features separately: different kinds of linguistic features (reflecting different social interactions) will have their own histories.