Southeast Asia in the Ancient Indian Ocean World; Combining Historical Linguistic and Archaeological Approaches

This PhD dissertation examines the role of insular Southeast Asia in the trans-regional networks of maritime trade that shaped the history of Indian Ocean. The work brings together data and approaches from archaeology, historical linguistics and other disciplines, proposing a reconstruction of cultural and linguistic contact between Southeast Asia and its maritime neighbours to the west in order to advance our historical understanding of this part of the world. Numerous biological, commercial and technical items are examined. The study underlines that the analysis of lexical data is one of the strongest tools to detect and analyse contact between two or more speech communities. It demonstrates how Southeast Asian products and concepts were mainly dispersed by speakers of Malay varieties, although other communities played a role as well. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the study offers new perspectives on the role of insular Southeast Asian agents on cultural dynamism and interethnic contact in the pre-modern Indian Ocean World

Urban Dynamics an Impression of Surabaya's Sociolinguistic Setting

This paper examines the sociolinguistic situation in the city of Surabaya, bypresenting an impression of various phenomena unique to Indonesia's secondlargest city. A surprisingly little amount of linguistic research has heretofore beencarried out on this subject, whereas it transpires from this study that enoughintriguing and unique things can be found in this Southeast Asian metropolis,both among its Javanese majority as well as its Madurese and Chinese inhabitants.Due to the lack of earlier relevant publications, this research is largely based onthe results of several fieldwork trips, which included the pleasant activities ofwatching television, interviewing people and making excursions in and aroundSurabaya to experience how languages are used in daily life. Additionally,concepts such as “language mixing”, “slang” and “attitudes towards language”are involved and considered very significant in disentangling the role andfunction of language in an urban setting

Some Introductory Notes on the Development and Characteristics of Sabah Malay

This is a preliminary description of the Malay variety used as a lingua franca in the Malaysian state of Sabah at the northernmost top of Borneo. The paper discusses a number of common linguistic features that distinguish Sabah Malay from other Malay varieties and analyses these features from a historical linguistic perspective. While it is argued that Sabah Malay has a close historical relation with other Malay dialects spoken in Borneo, especially Brunei Malay, the vernacular is also influenced phonologically and lexically by Sabah's indigenous and immigrant speech communities. Words and sentences recorded or elicited during fieldwork in various parts of Sabah illustrate these points

Tracing the Linguistic Crossroads Between Malay and Tamil

Speakers of Malay and Tamil have been in intermittent contact for roughly two millennia, yet extant academic work on the resultant processes of contact, lexical borrowing, and language mixing at the interface of these two speech communities has only exposed the tip of the proverbial iceberg. This paper presents an historical overview of language contact between Malay and Tamil through time and across the Bay of Bengal. It concludes with a call for future studies on the lexicology, dialectology, and use of colloquial language of both Malay and Tamil varieties

Improved clinical investigation and evaluation of high-risk medical devices: the rationale and objectives of CORE-MD (Coordinating Research and Evidence for Medical Devices)

: In the European Union (EU) the delivery of health services is a national responsibility but there are concerted actions between member states to protect public health. Approval of pharmaceutical products is the responsibility of the European Medicines Agency, whereas authorizing the placing on the market of medical devices is decentralized to independent 'conformity assessment' organizations called notified bodies. The first legal basis for an EU system of evaluating medical devices and approving their market access was the medical device directives, from the 1990s. Uncertainties about clinical evidence requirements, among other reasons, led to the EU Medical Device Regulation (2017/745) that has applied since May 2021. It provides general principles for clinical investigations but few methodological details-which challenges responsible authorities to set appropriate balances between regulation and innovation, pre- and post-market studies, and clinical trials and real-world evidence. Scientific experts should advise on methods and standards for assessing and approving new high-risk devices, and safety, efficacy, and transparency of evidence should be paramount. The European Commission recently awarded a Horizon 2020 grant to a consortium led by the European Society of Cardiology and the European Federation of National Associations of Orthopaedics and Traumatology, that will review methodologies of clinical investigations, advise on study designs, and develop recommendations for aggregating clinical data from registries and other real-world sources. The CORE-MD project (Coordinating Research and Evidence for Medical Devices) will run until March 2024; here we describe how it may contribute to the development of regulatory science in Europe

Multi-layered population structure in Island Southeast Asians

The history of human settlement in Southeast Asia has been complex and involved several distinct dispersal events. Here, we report the analyses of 1825 individuals from Southeast Asia including new genome-wide genotype data for 146 individuals from three Mainland Southeast Asian (Burmese, Malay and Vietnamese) and four Island Southeast Asian (Dusun, Filipino, Kankanaey and Murut) populations. While confirming the presence of previously recognised major ancestry components in the Southeast Asian population structure, we highlight the Kankanaey Igorots from the highlands of the Philippine Mountain Province as likely the closest living representatives of the source population that may have given rise to the Austronesian expansion. This conclusion rests on independent evidence from various analyses of autosomal data and uniparental markers. Given the extensive presence of trade goods, cultural and linguistic evidence of Indian influence in Southeast Asia starting from 2.5 kya, we also detect traces of a South Asian signature in different populations in the region dating to the last couple of thousand years