| East Central Maluku | |
|---|---|
| Ceram-Aru | |
| Geographic distribution: |
Indonesia |
| Linguistic classification: | Austronesian
|
| Subdivisions: |
Geser
Manipa
Seram ?
|
The East Central Maluku languages are a group of Austronesian languages (geographically Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages) spoken on and around the islands of Seram and Aru in the eastern Moluccas. None of the languages have more than about twenty thousand speakers, and several are endangered with extinction.
The East Central Maluku languages are traditionally divided into the Banda-Geser languages and the forty Seram languages, plus Manipa. However, a 2008 analysis of the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database,[1] while it supported the existence of the family at a 94% confidence level as long as the Aru languages were also included, only moderately supported the unity of the Seram (Ceram) languages, at 72%, and poorly supported the unity of Banda-Geser languages, at 57%. Manipa was not addressed. The composition of the family thus appears to be something like as follows: