A comparative linguistic study of three Malayan aborigine tribes
Paul B. Means published this comparative linguistic study in 1977, presenting parallel vocabulary from three Orang Asli languages of northern Malaya—Semang (Negrito) of Kedah, Sengoi of Perak, and Temiar of Kelantan—collected through direct fieldwork and supplemented by earlier scholarly sources. The article argues that these three languages, while mutually unintelligible as independent units, share structural features (particularly the n-infix morphology and dual pronoun systems) that align them with the Mon-Khmer branch of Austro-Asiatic rather than with the Austronesian family dominant in the region, and that their residual Old Indonesian (OIN) roots reflect varying degrees of proximity to coastal cultural influence.
Summary
Means structures the article around twelve semantic categories—adjectives, animals, body parts, hunt and farm, nature objects, personal relations, interrogatives, conjunctions, numerals, prepositions and pronouns, household, and verbs—presented in five parallel columns (English, Malay, Sengoi, Temiar, Semang). The word lists were gathered from a cyclostyled form of over 700 sentences prepared in English and Malay, with informants supplying equivalents in their mother tongues, supplemented by magnetic tape recordings. Means deliberately excluded culture borrowings (monetary terms, imported tools, weapons) to isolate the indigenous lexical core, and adopted a simplified Romanized orthography modelled on Indonesian spelling to make the material accessible to the journal’s general readership.
The analytical core of the article addresses the genetic classification of these languages. Means draws on P.W. Schmidt’s 1906 study in Bijdragen to establish the Mon-Khmer connection, providing parallel examples (e.g., Mon sok / Sengoi sok / Temiar sog / Semang sokui for “hair”) and demonstrating the widespread use of the n-infix to derive nouns from verbs and adjectives—a morphological process Schmidt identified as characteristic of the Mon-Khmer family. The article then situates these languages within the broader Austronesian framework by applying Otto Dempwolff’s Vergleichende Lautlehre des Austronesischen Wortschatzes (1934–1939) as a yardstick, and finally considers the Early Cham language of Indo-China as a potential intermediate link, following G.E. Marrison’s 1975 JMBRAS article on Cham-Malay affinities.
A notable finding is the near-total absence of Sanskrit or Hindu lexical influence in all three languages, with the sole exception of cosmological vocabulary (terms for heaven, eclipse, thunder, rainbow). Means interprets the varying percentages of OIN correspondence across the three languages as reflecting geographic distance from coastal cultural contact, with the most isolated groups retaining a larger proportion of their indigenous monosyllabic root stock.
Key Findings
- The total Orang Asli population of Malaya grew from 26,266 (1911 census) to 52,943 (1969 census), representing approximately 0.6% of Western Malaya’s total population of 8,819,928 in 1971; the four states of Perak, Pahang, Kelantan and Selangor contained 81% of this total (p. 48–49).
- Sengoi vocabulary shows a 34% correspondence with Dempwolff’s Old Indonesian (OIN) root storehouse of approximately 2,500 words; Temiar shows only 10%; Semang appears to show a higher figure than either but insufficient data precludes a precise calculation (p. 66).
- The n-infix operates differently across the three languages: in Sengoi and Temiar it forms nouns from verbs (e.g., Sengoi cha “to eat” → cha’na “food”) and from adjectives (e.g., ntoi “large” → teninoi “size, largeness”), while in Semang it simultaneously forms both the noun and the progressive verb (e.g., kebis “to die” → kenbis “death or dying”) (pp. 63–64).
- Temiar indicates future tense by adding m to the referent pronoun (e.g., yim- for “I [will]”), a feature absent in Sengoi, which uses the word ha or kaha; Semang uses the prefix mak for the future (p. 65).
- Cultural loan-words from surrounding dominant cultures (Malay, Chinese, Indian) constitute as much as 30% of the vocabulary used in ordinary Orang Asli conversation, a figure Means notes is increasing with radio broadcasting in principal Orang Asli languages and the growth of towns at the jungle’s edge (p. 68).
- Mon-Khmer cognates are more numerous in Sengoi and Temiar than in Semang; Means cites examples including mat/mad/mét (eye), moh/meuh/moh (nose), eng/yeik/yek (I), and ambo/ame/bo (mother), noting that Semang’s further historical removal from the “mother stem” makes the Mon-Khmer derivation less readily evident (pp. 61–62).
Conclusion
Means concludes that the three Orang Asli languages are independent linguistic units—neither dialects of one another nor derived from a single source—yet they share a common structural inheritance traceable to the Mon-Khmer branch of Austro-Asiatic, with their residual Austronesian (OIN) elements reflecting varying degrees of contact with coastal cultures. He invokes R.J. Wilkinson’s 1915 observation that the aboriginal tribes “are the one clue we have to the ancient history of the Peninsula” to frame his study as a contribution to understanding the deep prehistory of the region, and he calls for further fieldwork—particularly on Semang, where the pronoun system and adjective-derived nouns remain underdocumented—to complete the comparative picture.
Context
- Primary sources include Means’s own fieldwork (magnetic tape recordings and written elicitation from informants in Perak and Kelantan), Cik Asmah binte Haji Omar’s 1963 University of Malaya study of the Kentakbong Semang dialect, Paul Schebesta’s Among the Forest Dwarfs of Malaya (1927), I.H.N. Evans’s The Negritos of Malaya (1937), P.W. Schmidt’s 1906 articles in Bijdragen, and Dempwolff’s three-volume Vergleichende Lautlehre (1934–1939) (pp. 49, 61–66).
- The article contributes to the historiography of Southeast Asian linguistic prehistory by extending the Mon-Khmer comparison—previously limited to Sengoi and Semang by Schmidt—to include Temiar, and by applying Dempwolff’s OIN canon to a language group (Malayan hill tribes) that the original study could not address due to the absence of published grammars.