The internal history of the Alor-Pantar language family

This chapter demonstrates that the languages of Alor and Pantar share a common origin by applying the comparative method to primary lexical data from twelve languages sampled across the islands of the Alor-Pantar archipelago. More than one hundred proto-Alor-Pantar lexical items are reconstructed. An internal subgrouping based on shared phonological innovations is proposed and is compared to that derived using computational phylogenetic methods. It is argued that the Alor-Pantar group originally came from the region of the Pantar Strait.