A Typological Survey in Creolization and the Origin of South-East Asian Languages

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The present research makes up a part of the continuous investigation project on minority languages in South-East Asia, being carried out by the present author since last several years. The project has been concentrating on collecting and analyzing first-hand data on their present-day spoken languages of some national minorities in this region with the purpose of publishing introductory language books for the general reader. In the same fashion as the former researches, the researcher carried out several fieldworks every year, mainly in Myanmar, collecting data of the spoken variations of the target languages by way of information interview, and analyzed them upon their syntactic structures in order to identify typological properties of these languages.The principal target of research has been Mon, which is said to be spoken in so-called "language islands", scattered mainly in Myanmar and Thailand. This minority language is conceived of as belonging to the Austroasiatic Language Family … More ; in the same way as with the other languages of this language family, however, Mon has long been hardly well investigated hitherto, leaving aside some linguistic-ethnographic aspects such as kinship terms or body parts and genealogical treatises based on such data, what might roughly be summarized as "19th century linguistics". Probably for the first time, the present research was in the position to collect first-hand data of the spoken variety of the present-day Mon language sufficient for making apparent major characteristics of its syntactic structure, which might be fully utilized in preparing an introductory language book in Mon designed for not only language research. Although its publication itself has not been actualized within in the period of the present research, even the general reader might be in a position to gain basic control of this language necessary for taking practical contact to native Mons.As for linguistic treatise in the narrow sense of the term, the present research concentrated, exactly as the former researchers mentioned above, on elaborating the transliteration system of minority languages of the region and standardizing the typological parameters needed for describing different languages and comparing their descriptions with one another so that both a new research on a particular language in this region and a theoretical survey in linguistic typology with a more general character in succession might be carried out with much ease. Less