LANGUAGES OF SOUTHERN INDO-CIIINA. 23 



a considerable number of names of plants, animals and the like, 

 which run (more or less) through the whole range of Malayo- 

 Polynesian languages from Madagascar to Hawaii and from 

 Formosa to New Zealand, has shown that the speakers (whoever 

 they were) of the mother tongue from which these innumerable 

 languages were evolved, were a seafaring people, of some 

 moderate degree of civilization, (they were acquainted with the 

 use of iron), who at the stage preceding the differentiation of 

 these languages (but not necessarily originally) inhabited a long 

 coastline of some good-sized country situated within the tropics, 

 somewhere in the western half of the vast region over which 

 these languages now extend. He points to the South-Eastern 

 coast of Indo-China as the country that fits in best with this 

 conclusion ; and without going into details, lays some stress on 

 the considerable Malayan element that is to be found in the 

 existing languages of that region, which fact, as he observes, in 

 view of the relative unimportance of the small Malayan com- 

 munities to be found there in modern times, can only be explain- 

 ed by the hypothesis that they formerly constituted a much 

 more numerous and powerful factor there than they do in our 

 own day. 



This last point it has been my endeavour to illustrate in the 

 present paper. 



It may be convenient if I summarize the conclusions to 

 which the considerations here brought together appear to me 

 to lead: — 



(1) The Malayan element in Cham and its cognate dialects 

 was not borrowed from any other Malayan language or group 

 of languages. It has been separated from the western insular 

 groups for as many centuries, as they have been from one an- 

 other, and has become differentiated from them as they have 

 amongst themselves. 



(2) The Southern Mon-Annam languages and Cham are 

 at once Malayan and non-Malayan : largely Malayan in structural 

 formation, mixed but predominantly non-Malayan in vocabulary, 

 they are probably the result of an intimate mixture between 



banana, rice (in lin.sk and husked), shark, prawn, sea-turtle, buffalo 

 and crocodile : but there are a good many more besides. 



II. A. Sue. No. 38, 1902. 



