English and Linguistics Seminar: Hannah Fleming (Phd student) "The Central Palawano language of the Philippines: Documentation and Context"

This presentation introduces an ongoing project to document Central Palawano, a language variety spoken in the far west of the Philippines by people from an upland rice-farming culture. Central Palawano is part of the Palawano ‘language cluster’ – a group of closely-related language varieties – and this project can throw light not only on relationships within the cluster, but also between Palawano and other languages in the region. While archaeological and historical research has tended to focus on centres of political power, evidence from vocabulary and tradition suggests that people of the Palawano cluster have long been integrated into the far-flung networks of exchange which existed in island Southeast Asia long before the arrival of Europeans.