Language and the Study of Southeast Asia

Abstract

Abstract:This essay starts an engagement between recent streams of scholarship in linguistics and the study of Mainland Southeast Asia. Language is crucial to the study of Southeast Asia, although it tends to be neglected as fewer people learn local languages, and earlier philological approaches have fallen out of favor. The study of language can reveal aspects of the past and the present through the sounds, syntax, and vocabularies of the region. Linguistic scholarship often does not communicate in ways that let scholars of other disciplines make use of its insights, despite so much scholarship having great potential to contribute to the study of Southeast Asia, such as the work on contact linguistics and multilingualism. Our focus is on the "Greater Burma Zone," an area of linguistic, cultural, religious, and political contact and interaction that has existed probably since the middle of the first millennium AD. This concept rescues the study of the western Mainland and environs from Burma/Myanmar, which some non-majority groups in the region object to, or whose nationalist discourses seek distance from the modern country and its realities. Our conception also loosens the grip of the present and allows a view of an understudied and undertheorized region of Southeast Asia in greater historical depth. Each essay in this special issue may have a narrow focus on a particular language and place but lead to a wider consideration of the usefulness of language as a way to understand Southeast Asia.