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.
Abstract: An examination of patterns of language contact and convergence among the languages spoken by the Kachin people of northern Burma and adjacent regions in China and India lies at the heart of this study. The "Kachin" do not form a linguistic unity but are rather a "trans-ethnic category" comprising several Tibeto-Burman-speaking groups with long-standing, multilingual interactions and shared cultural features. The study proposes a "Kachin Zone": not only a geographic area, but a culturally defined space and social network grounded in sustained interaction, which has ultimately led to linguistic convergences. Data from published sources and extensive fieldwork confirm a set of contact-induced linguistic features across the Kachin languages, which belong to two otherwise rather distant branches of the Tibeto-Burman language family. These include, in addition to lexical borrowings from the dominant Jinghpaw language, convergence across the languages in demonstrative pronouns, which encode relative altitude; in the flexible positioning of demonstratives and secondary verbs; in structures of possession marking; and in the verbal complex. Comparisons with closely related languages outside the Kachin Zone show that these features inside the Zone cannot be explained through inheritance or chance alone. Furthermore, the Kachin languages fall into "core" (Jinghpaw and the Northern Burmish language) versus "peripheral" (Lisu, Rawang) categories, with the latter languages participating in only some of the convergence of patterns. These aspects of the various languages point to long-term contact between socially strongly connected speech groups and offer a model for understanding ethnolinguistically defined zones of interaction in Mainland Southeast Asia.
Abstract: Shan varieties and Khuen are relatively recent arrivals in the northern Burma Zone. With close relatives in Core Mainland Southeast Asia, most prominently Lao and Thai, Shan and Khuen play a special role in the study of the dynamics between the two linguistic areas. Shan can be seen as a major factor in the formation of a convergence zone in northern Myanmar, covering Shan State and parts of Kachin and Kayah States, as well as adjacent areas in Northeast India and Southwest. It is a locally dominant and nationally subordinate language at the same time, and while being part of the linguistic landscape of the Greater Burma Zone, it also shares numerous features with languages in adjacent areas, especially Core Mainland Southeast Asia. This paper looks at the development, spread, and influence of Shan and other Tai languages in the area and puts these developments in a historical perspective. A case of special interest is the recent development of Khuen, a language very closely related to Northern Thai (Lan Na) but under increasing pressure from Burmese since the mid-twentieth century. This pressure is reflected in the replacement of traditional vocabulary by Burmese loans. This process moves Khuen away from Lan Na and brings it closer to Shan, equally influenced by Burmese.
Abstract: The usual linguistic and anthropological narrative of the Khasian languages spoken in Meghalaya in Northeast India is that they are the only remaining evidence of an Austroasiatic language whose speakers once covered most of the Northeast region. Over time, the story continues, incursive migrations of speakers of Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman languages gradually absorbed and assimilated most of this speech community, leaving only the small pockets of Khasian speech found today. To what extent do the Khasian languages and the cultural practices of the Khasi people support such a reading of the past? Indeed, the languages do bear traces of movements of speakers of various language families and trade goods along a northern land corridor joining the Indian Subcontinent with Southeast Asia. But the Khasian languages themselves do not simply read as palimpsests of new groups moving into the area. From a linguistic perspective, the languages align neither fully with the languages of South Asia nor again with the languages of Southeast Asia. The Khasian languages throw into relief the limitations of the intellectual constructs of the South Asian and Southeast Asian "linguistic areas."
Abstract: Language variation in the Greater Burma Zone—particularly Burma—remains under-described and under-theorized. Descriptions of language variation are caught up in taking language as a marker of ethnicity. Language variation, including the development of dialects, has come about in part through language contact, but the effects of language cannot be seen through the usual practices of historical or comparative linguistics and their projects to classify languages and ethnicities. Burmese dialect speakers tend to live in more highly multilingual contexts than do the majority of Standard Burmese speakers. Recognizing the unusual features of Tavoyan—especially aspects of its sound system—as the result of language contact sheds light on a history of linguistic, hence social, contact with speakers of Karen languages. This past of contact with Karen speakers and widespread multilingualism are precisely the aspects of social history that historical sources do not capture. Tavoyan epitomizes the situation in countless other speech communities in the Greater Burma Zone, whose pasts are largely absent from history. In its sounds and syntax, the Tavoyan dialect tells us of the social history of the speech community: Tavoyans tend to think of themselves as a local embodiment of the supra-regional Bamā identity. Despite such ties, the Tavoyan community is much like other groups in the Greater Burma Zone who "lack" history in the sense of written records. In such a context, the study of language itself can serve as a proxy for other kinds of history and can reveal something of the social past of a community.
