Crossing the Border Historical and Linguistic Divides Among the Bunaq in Central Timor

The Bunaq are a Papuan language-speaking people straddling the border of Indonesian West Timor and independent East Timor. This paper looks at the history of the Bunaq as a “border“ people in Timor. “Border“ is interpreted here in two ways, as referring to: (i) a political division, the boundary line separating one country from another, and (ii) a linguistic division, the distinguishing line between Papuan and Austronesian languages. I examine the effect that the Bunaq position at the political and linguistic borders of Timor has had on the people and their language

Wallacea, a Linguistic Area

Wallacea is home to languages of the Austronesian language family, and to languages from multiple Papuan, or non-Austronesian, language families. It has long been observed that the Austronesian languages of Wallacea display Papuan influences. Some linguists have attempted to define linguistic Wallacea (albeit under other names) in terms of this hybridity. The present article however shows that the zone of Papuan influence on Austronesian languages is much wider than Wallacea, encompassing areas east as well as west of New Guinea. Within this wider zone, called here Linguistic Melanesia, a more restricted Wallacean linguistic area can nevertheless be identified as a subcategory defined by a set of specific features not found elsewhere in Linguistic Melanesia. There is evidence that Linguistic Wallacea is the result of prehistoric interactions between Austronesian migrants and a pre-existing population of seafaring Papuan agriculturalists, who were already well established in Wallacea before the Austronesians arrived.La Wallacea comprend des langues de la famille austronésienne et des langues des multiples familles de langues papoues, ou non austronésiennes. On sait depuis longtemps que les langues austronésiennes de la Wallacea dénotent des influences papoues. Certains linguistes ont tenté de définir une Wallacea linguistique (sous d’autres désignations) en fonction de cette hybridité. Le présent article montre cependant que la zone d’influence papoue sur les langues austronésiennes est beaucoup plus étendue que la Wallacea, englobant des régions à l’est et à l’ouest de la Nouvelle-Guinée. Dans cette zone plus vaste, appelée ici Mélanésie linguistique, une aire linguistique wallacéenne plus restreinte peut néanmoins être considérée comme une sous-catégorie définie par un ensemble de traits spécifiques qu’on ne trouve pas ailleurs en Mélanésie linguistique. Il est prouvé que cette Wallacea linguistique résulte d’interactions aux temps préhistoriques entre les migrants austronésiens et une population pré-existante d’agriculteurs et de marins papous, déjà bien établis dans la Wallacea avant l’arrivée des Austronésiens

Climate justice and human rights

Climate change as well as climate policies can have adverse effects on the human rights of certain population groups – and can exacerbate situations of injustice. As it stands today, the human rights regime is not set to sufficiently address these situations of climate injustice. In this article, I suggest a systematization of the normative climate justice literature that can be used as an analytical framework to evaluate current developments in human rights law and policy, and their potential to diminish inter-national, intra-societal and inter-generational climate injustice. I argue that further advancing procedural and substantive human rights obligations and corresponding enforcement mechanisms constitute one important way of establishing climate justice practices. Moreover, I suggest that the normative climate justice literature can be fruitfully used in International Relations to evaluate policy developments at the intersection between climate change and other policy fields

From the Global to the Local: How International Children’s Rights in Bangladesh Reach the Grassroots Level

The Government of Bangladesh has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the ILO Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention.Although national legislation pertaining to children’s rights is inconsistent and the National Child Labor Policy has yet to be adopted, many activities to transport children’s rights principles to underprivileged children have already been initiated in Bangladesh.These mainly take the form of projects by International Organizations or the Bangladesh Government, implemented through local Non-Governmental Organizations or local government structures.Two programs are introduced here, the rural “Food for Education” Program and the urban project, “Prevention and Elimination of Selected Worst Forms of Child Labour in the Informal Economy in Dhaka City”.Both are analyzed in terms of what mechanisms and actor constellations were used to promote children’s rights at the grassroots level.Even though these projects reflect the principles of global norms and transport them to the local people, reaching out to a high number of underprivileged and poor children remains a challenge

Elevation in the spatial deictic systems of Alor-Pantar languages

This chapter provides a formal and semantic typology of the highly elaborate spatial deictic systems involving an elevation component found in the Alor-Pantar languages. The systems show a high degree of variation both in the number of paradigms of elevation-marked terms as well as in the number of semantic components within the different elevational domains. The chapter further considers the history and reconstructability of an elevational system to proto-Alor-Pantar, observing that the elevation distinction itself is very stable in the deictic systems of the AP languages, but that the terms of the systems are not always stable and that the systems are often subject to elaboration

State-of-the-art in the documentation of the Papuan languages of Timor, Alor, Pantar, and Kisar; A bibliography

The Timor-Alor-Pantar (TAP) language family has a special place in South-East Asian linguistics; its members make up the western extreme of the Papuan language sphere. Along with an exhaustive bibliography of works on the TAP languages, this paper presents a state-of-the-art review of the ongoing documentation of the TAP language family in terms of both linguistic description and (pre-)historical reconstruction. The paper concludes with a consideration of the prospects for future studies of the TAP languages.KeywordsDocumentation, Papuan languages, Timor, Alor, Pantar, Kisar