The Early Switch Hypothesis: Linguistic Evidence for Contact Between Negritos and Austronesians

Abstract

The Philippine population consists of two generally quite distinct racial types. There are the so-called Malay peoples, numbering over 50 million, and then there are the Negritos, probably totaling fewer than 15,000, and speaking perhaps more than twenty-five distinct languages, about one-quarter .of the total number of Philippine languages. The former are often referred to in the literature as "lowlanders" to distinguish them from the Negritos, who are typically hunter-gatherers who live in foothill or mountain areas. In this paper neither "Malay" nor "lowlanders" will be used to refer to non-Negritos. The first term implies that they came from or are somehow descended from Malays, which we know to be patently false. The second term implies that there are no mountain dwelling non-Negritos, which is also false. They will be referred to simply as non-Negritos.