The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora killed the entire population of the small Sumbawan kingdom of Tambora. With them died an entire language. How much of it survives?
Owen Phillips collected the vocabulary at Bima in January 1815 under Stamford Raffles' instructions, as part of the broader survey for the *History of Java*. Raffles published it in 1817 — unaware that the April 1815 eruption had eliminated every native speaker. Modern computational analysis (Mark Donohue, 2007) classified the surviving 48 words as Papuan, not Austronesian — making Tambora the westernmost Papuan language ever documented, with its nearest relatives 1,500 km east in New Guinea.
Read the full story →The 1815 Tambora eruption destroyed the small Sumbawan kingdom of Tambora and killed its entire population of approximately 12,000 people. The Tambora language — a Papuan rather than Austronesian tongue, unrelated to all other documented Indonesian languages — died with them. Only a 48-word vocabulary survives.
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