Beyond ‘Macassans’: Speculations on layers of Austronesian contact in northern Australia

Abstract

This article seeks to identify traces of language contact between speakers of Australian languages and speakers of Austronesian languages other than Macassans. I put forward evidence for lexical borrowing into northern Australian languages from Austronesian languages in South and East Sulawesi, Maluku and Timor-Rote, as well as from Austronesian languages of the Sama-Bajau and Oceanic subgroups. Although the evidence is fragmentary, the presence of these borrowings could be taken to indicate a more varied history of contact with Australia than the Macassan-dominated linguistic data suggest.