Sailors, Tailors, Cooks, and Crooks: On Loanwords and Neglected Lives in Indian Ocean Ports

Abstract

A renewed interested in Indian Ocean studies has underlined possibilities of the transnational. This study highlights lexical borrowing as an analytical tool to deepen our understanding of cultural exchanges between Indian Ocean ports during the long nineteenth century, comparing loanwords from several Asian and African languages and demonstrating how doing so can re-establish severed links between communities. In this comparative analysis, four research avenues come to the fore as specifically useful to explore the dynamics of non-elite contact in this part of the world: (1) nautical jargon, (2) textile terms, (3) culinary terms, and (4) slang associated with society’s lower strata. These domains give prominence to a spectrum of cultural brokers frequently overlooked in the wider literature. It is demonstrated through concrete examples that an analysis of lexical borrowing can add depth and substance to existing scholarship on interethnic contact in the Indian Ocean, providing methodological inspiration to examine lesser studied connections. This study reveals no unified linguistic landscape, but several key individual connections between the ports of the Indian Ocean frequented by Persian, Hindustani, and Malay-speaking communities.

An Aslian origin for the word gibbon

“…In addition to the slave raiding, the formation of British Malaya during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a degree of homogenisation of the Malay language and there is some evidence of a decline in the Malay use of Aslian loanwords. Tan 1998, Fraser Gupta 2008, Tan 2009, van der Sijs 2011, Hoogervorst 2018. Loanwords are particularly common among the names of the plants and animals that were exported from the Archipelago.…”

Co-governance, Transregional Maritime Conventions, and Indigenous Customary Practices Among Subsistence Fishermen in Ende, Indonesia

“…Legal developments reflect a broader pluralistic tendency in international law that seeks to revitalize customary and faith-based systems and the value of cultural heritages (von Benda-Beckman and von Benda-Beckman, 2011;Adhuri, 2018Adhuri, , 2019von Benda-Beckmann, 2019). An exclusive emphasis on indigenous tenure arrangements runs counter to the many interconnections, linkages, and transregional mobility that have dominated maritime activities in Southeast Asia for the past two millennia (Lockard, 2010;Henley and Schulte Norholdt, 2015;Manguin, 2017;Hoogervorst, 2018). The renewed focus on customary and user-rights approaches has dire implications for some of the most cosmopolitan yet impoverished fishing communities in this part of the world.…”