#austronesian

Aesthetic of the languages on earth : Cebuano

Depends who asks, and for what reason I’m involved in the conversation. As Nell Irvin Painter says, race depends on who you're asking, when and where you're asking, and for what reason you're asking. It is not real: what you see is a power relationship made flesh.

I have Yellow (Huaxia/Han Sinitic originals), and Brown (Austronesian: Sea Nomadic Minyue + Orang Asli or Orang Malay) ancestors.

I identify as Yellow, because my government documents would reflect that I’m Chinese, according to the Chinese-Indian-Malay-Other racial model that the Malacca Straits adopted from Eurocolonial race models.

Another factor is that this is how the world sees me via the European racial model [White, Black, Yellow, Brown, Native] as a colonial social construct based on the Anglosphere’s stereotypes to categorise peoples based on appearances. A model that is not necessarily familiar to the rest of the world (even though ethnic persons can recognise they’re non-white). Externally, and for the most part, I navigate the world as a Yellow person, not Brown.

My phenotypical traits are stereotypically East Asian and Southeast Asian. I know this because I’ve been asked frequently if I’m Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Thai or Vietnamese. The only times I’ve been assumed to be Chinese is when I’m in my homelands. Otherwise when there’s racism involved, or if it is accompanied by racial slurs—almost like Chinese-ness is invisibilised outside of sino-enclaves unless it’s a topic of derision.

With this said, there are definitely significant moments where I do identify as Yellow-Brown as a point of cultural reclamation and accuracy. It further identifies distinctions in my multi-ethnic and multi-cultural background from what is “centrally East Asian”. This does not change my solidarities with other Brown peoples, nor how boldly I wear and claim my own Brown ancestry and connection. And again, I will not understand what it’s like to navigate the world as a Brown person. The extent of my Brown identity is through heritage and bloodlines.

Brown as a category tends to apply to South Asians, Southwest Asians, Southeast Asians, Southeast Asian Islanders and Pacific Islanders. Of the Southeast Asians, there are complications where Vietnam and Singapore comes into play, since these countries consist of large Sinodiasporas that vehemently do not identify as ‘mainland Chinese’, with Singapore being deeply multicultural and multiracial.

And it seems to be an issue of BOTH classism, Sinophobia and model minority myth, where Singaporeans are occasionally counted as EAsian and Yellow when they are seen as rich Chinamen capitalists even though this doesn’t even describe all Singaporeans who have a pretty huge financial disparity. But Singaporeans are considered SEAsian and Brown when they consistently stand with their SEAblings who they are deeply loyal to and at one point nearly merged (or became dependents to lmao).

SEAsians are mostly Brown when we are associated with “poverty”, “backwards”, “jungle Asians”, when our skin complexions vary significantly based on lifestyles and climate, as well as each of our diversity in ethnic backgrounds. It is likely the lifestyles that they ridicule because of the ancient belief that exposure to the Sun = “poor farmers/rural farmers” especially to the Koreans and Japanese, and most of the racist ones don’t know much about ethnic differences. They also seem to base their racism on some extension of their racism towards Okinawans as an indigenous peoples under Japanese colonisation, and Chinese esp. Southern Chinese who are mostly farmers/peasants and of Baiyue descent, who are the stereotyped basis of this ridicule.

Meanwhile Sinodiasporic ethnic minorities are ignored by anti-SEA trolls, and categorised as Brown/Yellow based the whims of the SEA and EA ethnic majorities. Sometimes, they see us as Yellow and compare us to mainland Chinese if we are behaving too “capitalistic” or “communistic” whatever the fuck that means 💀 And they’ve used these exact reasons to harass us and sympathy-farm from the West, AND to kill millions of our ancestors with the backings of the West so. Fuck. That.

Being Yellow is a privilege only in EAsia and sinicised regions, otherwise it’s literally the most hideous illusion of privilege and is a literal neon sign inviting harassment from all parties while they maintain the facade of punching up. Even being in Australia, being Asian is one of the most harassed identities. Likewise with being Brown and Brown privilege in SEAsia where one is the majority, versus outside of it.

Culture

I was born and raised in Southeast Asia which is a rojak (mix) of languages and cultures. If you ask a SEAsian Chinese if they’d identify as EAsian Chinese, you’d get a vehement outcry. Even in Sinitic-dominated parts, most are strongly identified with the SEAsian ingroup, than with the EAsian outgroup. These ancestral lines are culturally SEAsian and have indigenised to the lands.

For those in Brown-dominated parts of SEA, being Chinese even if multigenerationally native-born, makes one eternally peripheral and a foreigner. It is therefore a defensive mechanism to identify as indigenised to the majority’s culture. Identifying as EAsian Chinese and sinicizing as a defensive mechanism (clinging to your culture) could get you socially ostracised, investigated, arrested or even killed in parts of SEA for being a suspected communist threat or a dissenter. No matter how wealthy you are, death is a stone’s throw away. Your best chance is to migrate, and this apartheid is why the Chinese population in Malaysia has plummeted.

Growing up, this was a fact I contended with, repeated endlessly by my elders. I didn’t really believe them and didn’t really know the gravity of it—not until I grew up and my life could no longer be comfortably contained in acceptance of my racialised treatment, anti-immigration discrimination and more.

Given that other parts of Asia makes immigration and citizenship near impossible, many Malaysian-Chinese have chosen to reside in the Anglosphere.

This is the silent inequality that we do not talk about for the conditions of Sinodiasporas across the Malay Archipelago, and the pressures of migration abroad for some of my SEAblings.

My school cikgu (Malay teacher) would group me together with my Malay best friends whenever we played together and allow me to join in her class until they realised I couldn’t speak Bahasa Melayu and had Mandarin classes to attend. This wasn’t just a point of my complexion which probably played a factor since I was darker than even my Malay best friends at that age, but also the fact of my behaviours which were deeply based on my upbringing.

My upbringing was strongly tied to a region of Malaysia and Indonesia which I went annually/bi-annually to stay for sometimes up to a month per year, since I was born. It is where both my maternal and paternal hometowns were. It was also tied to Malaysian-Chinese culture and norms [which is an indigenised ethnocultural identity called Peranakan Baba-Nyonya], since this is where a majority of my ancestry came from.

Biology

My biological ethnicity consists of Han Chinese (Yellow) and Austronesian (Brown) Baiyue, the latter of which is now known as the Southern Chinese. Specifically, I am a descendant of the Minyue, now known as Hokkien or Fujian or Min peoples. My ancestral Minyue tribe were sea nomads, and were related with Pacific Islanders and more closely to Taiwanese Aborigines. We did a lot of trade, and even shared in ship-building engineering techniques. However since the Qin Dynasty, Baiyue Austronesian roots have been so altered in our collective memories such that Minyue rituals and stories are absorbed into Han Chinese identities, and our peoples hold ourselves to Han Chinese standards.

Reclaiming my Baiyue Min history has been so powerful in also undoing the centuries of moralising and shame that comes in being a descendant of the Baiyue tribes.

In recognising my Austronesian Orang Asli or Orang Malay (Brown) ancestors from the Malacca Straits, I am therefore ethnoculturally Peranakan Baba-Nyonya, which is officially recognised in Malaysia as Straits Chinese with ethnocultural backgrounds mixed with the indigenous peoples of the land.

“Peranakan” means “child of”.

“Baba” refers to the Hokkien honorific for Straits Chinese men as well as a false cognate for the Persian, Hindi and Malay term of affection for one’s grandparents.

“Nyonya” refers to the Malay and Indonesian term for a foreign married lady, and is a loan word borrowed from “Donha/Donna” a Portuguese word for lady. It is pronounced “nyonya”, “nonya” or “nō͘-niâ”.

However my grandparents’ generation don’t talk about this part of our background, especially due to the Malay and Chinese tensions in the region, and the anti-Chinese genocides throughout Nusantara region extending through recent history (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore). My knowledge about this part of my ancestry is through my Auntie, Father and my Grandaunties, but is shrouded in mystery. This is also a part of the reason I do not know if my ancestors were either of the Orang Asli (non-Malay indigenous peoples) or the Orang Malay.

In Malaysia, cooking/eating Malay foods, participating in the culture and even having Malay descendants do not qualify you to be Malay. You have to convert to Islam, speak the language, live in the region, then apply to be officially registered as Malay [your descendants and spouses must be Muslim, this is the law]. Despite this, you may still ONLY be considered a Muslim, not Malay. Chinese Muslims may suffer prejudice and often need to divest from Chinese practices as they are seen as incompatible spiritualities, whereas the many Malay cultures have been rebuilt on Islam and are afforded greater leeway.

The part of Syariah law regarding Islam conversion came into effect after the birth of my Peranakan Nyonya my great grandmother, which is why many Peranakans aren’t inherited Muslims.

I do not identify as Orang Malay nor Orang Asli myself, although I’m reconnecting with how elements from this bloodline and its cultures are a part of my daily life and that of my elders. It is difficult to hold this along with my primarily Chinese identity, due to how much oppression and pains are between them. I might reassess should new information arise. I do identify as Peranakan Baba-Nyonya.

Even in Nusantara, my family and I are considered only Chinese which comes with its own set of risks and dangers depending on where you are, due to anti-Chinese sentiments which may lead to fatalities, restricted rights, second-class treatment and almost no platform to speak on (Note: Freedom of speech is not a thing in Asia, we are reminded that speech always has consequence, it is not a “freedom”. No it’s not inherently oppressive, freedom of speech in the West is an illusion anyways and only select peoples may speak without consequence. Voices calling for human rights being suppressed or faced with death IS oppressive regardless of where it applies to.). It is so dominated by peoples who would be considered “brown-complexioned”, that my parents and even my relatives want me to be more tanned. We respect the values shared with the indigenous peoples of the region, but are also extremely cautious and my elders accept that we do not have a voice. We have faced death threats and our extended Chinese community have suffered fatalities within the last decades.

Meanwhile the Orang Malay and Orang Asli do suffer from racial prejudice by the Chinese, ranging from harmful stereotypes to significant impacts for employment rates, pay differences especially in more Chinese-majority regions. There are pressures from other relatives of mine on the Chinese-majority side who prefer fairer complexions as a sign of class stemming from Ancient Chinese traditions (NOT whiteness or anti-Blackness, don’t pmo). While other relatives of mine living amongst Orang Malay and Orang Asli dominated regions, prefer darker complexions also as a sign of class and survival under the Malay supremacy.

Yet all of these stories and experiences still echo in my own and I intend to claim back as much as I can. Much has been lost to time and decisions taken by my ancestors, which I’ve been trying to reconnect with and repair.

All of these identities I consider indigenous to their respective regions, but as someone who has been raised by nomadic and migrant values by generations of diasporic persons, it obviously has further complexity than just that.

So am I monoracial multiethnic, or multiethnic multiracial? Again, depends on who asks. I have Peranakan culture and blood, which means I am multiracial. I have multiple ethnicities and cultures that contribute to my being, which makes me multi-ethnic. But to this world, I am simply Asian, Yellow (mostly).

Is this a problem of the peoples? No. It is a problem of colonial racial models, wherein we are ironically told that we are required to sort ourselves into categories based on hexcodes of skin colour, in order to fight back against discrimination based on skin colour. These racial models will never capture the complexity of nomadic and indigenised populations and while it has been helpful to the West, in a globalised era it has completely fucked Asians over with the colonial-indigenous binary and the racial categorisations incompatible with and reductive to our complexities.

Also race and ethnicity and multiculturalism in my home country at least while I was growing up (which was a decade ago) was not at all like it is in the Anglosphere where the divisions are clear and must be mutually exclusive.

Where I’m from, we don’t even have the idea of cultural appropriation between our own multiethnic and multiracial citizens, because we were all growing up in a deeply mixed and indigenised culture which was strategically built to reduce ethnic enclaves. We all wore each other’s cultural attires whenever racial harmony events rolled around, and it was acceptable and encouraged. This is NOTHING like any Anglospheric person can even begin to fathom.

Systemic Racism & Xenophobia

This isn’t to say my homelands are free of racism, because it certainly isn’t towards migrants of South Asian descent (Tamil, Indian, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi) who face the most severe marginalisations by the Malays and Chinese citizens, and have been talking about it more and more which I absolutely commend. This racism does affect the South Asian citizens in the form of racial prejudice, but I am unsure if this occurs with/out systemic effects/to what extent—would be best to defer to them for this judgment.

Some netizens have shared that law enforcement in Chinese-dominant parts of the Straits disproportionately targets anyone perceived as a Chinese or South Asian migrant, as well as anyone perceived as a Malay or South Asian citizen, during random public screenings. This only furthers confirmation biases to do with criminalising and racial profilings, and does fall under systemic racism.

Law enforcement in Malay and “Bumiputera”-dominant parts of the Straits disproportionately targets anyone perceived as a Chinese during random screenings, border-crossings, framings/plantings, anything involving going to the Malay*Bumiputera-dominated administrative and legal offices. Some involve “trouble with documentations” which can apparently (as said by locals) be resolved by extortions/bribery. This creates systemic inaccessibility, systemic barriers, criminalising and racial profilings, which falls under systemic racism.

On the household income of each citizen racial group, Straits-Indians and Straits-Chinese earn the most in the Malacca Straits, while the Straits-Malay and Malaysian Bumiputera are reported to earn the least. The interracial wage gap is the smallest in Singapore, greater in Malaysia. Neither household income nor the levels of racial prejudice, necessarily equates to more or less systemic power.

Indigeneity

“Bumiputera” and “Pribumi” mean “sons of the soil” to refer to indigeneity in the Nusantara region. However, they have become what scholars term as supremacist concepts to maintain hegemony over regions in Malaysia and Indonesia respectively. They privilege those who qualify for indigeneity and thus privileges and protections under the government, but includes some non-indigenous peoples and excludes other indigenous groups. These are often created in line with anti-Chinese policies, xenophobic, colonial and imperialist agendas, thus creating an apartheid. [Source]

There have been repetitive measures taken by the Malaysian government to minimise the rights of non-Muslims, non-“Bumiputera” and non-Malays. What does constitute racism and the control of systemic privileges and policies, involves the state—which appears in Malaysia with the anti-Chinese apartheid and Bumiputera privileges that goes beyond indigenous preservation and equity. This does fall under systemic racism.

In Singapore, Malays do receive indigenous protections and equity measures, as can be seen in the 1969 statement. With this said, Singapore is against any form of racial supremacy that exceeds equity.

It appears that the idea of indigeneity at least at a “constitutional level”, follows after Eurocolonial definitions.

However, there have been long-lasting disputes over this due to the ethno-religious definitions and the redrawing of lines to change what constitutes “Malay” and “Bumiputera” to favour the Malay racial group. In some countries of the straits, this maintain the Malay*Bumiputera Islamic supremacy. In others—especially Singapore, it is more about equity and pacification due being the only sinicized country in a region surrounded by Malay*Bumiputera- and Islam-ruled countries.

Race

Race is a concept brought over by Eurocolonisers. Racial models are more used in Malaysia and Singapore, whereas Indonesia prefers to recognise ethnicity over race.

In Malaysia, race registration follows the model of Malay/Bumiputera, Chinese, Indian and Other. While Malay and “Bumiputera” are not interchangeable, and Orang Malay and Orang Asli are some subgroups of “Bumiputera”.

In some parts of the straits, due to the Eurocolonial ignorant race model, “Malay” became a term for a broader “race” encompassing Brown peoples in the region, despite it traditionally referring to only one group of Nusantara natives. This gives rise to its ambiguity, empowering its instrumentalisation to maintain a Malay class based on Muslim hegemony.

Recently, Peranakan Baba-Nyonya has been recognised as an official sub-ethnic category. In the Indonesian-Malaysian merger states of Sabah and Sarawak, they are allowed more diversity in ethnic minorities. After the 50s, in Malaysia, Malay became an ethnoreligious identity. Anyone who fulfils the legal criteria under Article 160 in the constitution, can be registered as Malay. The criteria involves becoming a citizen, converting to Muslim, speaking Bahasa Melayu and living in either Singapore, Malaysia or Brunei.

In Singapore, race registration follows the CMIO framework (Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other), as per the Eurocolonial groupings. It depends on birth registration, and if parents are unable to decide, the child would follow their father’s parentage.

Conclusion

Overall my nations were carved and boundaried by the greedy knife of colonisers, was formed and built primarily from migrants and migrant labour. It is generally understood that the Malay peoples deemed “indigenous” were actually “migrants” from other parts of Nusantara such as the Riau Islands, Johor, and other parts of Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand.

The actual indigenous peoples of the Straits hold different names. Some are listed under the official “sons of the state” and “sons of the nation”, while others are unlisted—yet most if not all receive Bumi privileges, with exceptions to any indigenous peoples that disagree with the hegemony. The KDM is a popular model in Borneo to refer to the Kadazan, Dusun and Murut peoples. The Orang Laut are the indigenous group of Singapore. *a settler genocide currently happening in Nusantara is that of West Papuans, under the Indonesian imperialist government.

Orang Malay recognition of migrant-hood and indigeneity (for discrimination or protection) were sort of… muddied heavily in history because indigenous status has always been dependent on colonial timelines, and because of Malay-dominance and Islamic dominance within the system.

This is even more complicated by the fact of Chinese peoples building domiciles and nomadic routes in the region pre-Eurocolonisation, dating as far back as the Song Dynasty. Yet we are not deemed indigenous despite pre-colonial evidence of our relations with the land.

Many SEAsian ancestors arrived from other colonised parts of Nusantara and parts of especially Southern China (also suffering under Eurocolonisation at the time) where colonisation wasn’t this diplomatic agreement. Not to mention the fraught differences between the Malayan Sultanate and the Malayan peoples (who many were also multi-ethnic despite being deemed mono-racial by colonial standards).

Yet each and every one of my ancestors were still deemed aborigines and indigenous to their respective homelands and thus subject to racism and indigemisia, as well as Xenophobia. For some, indigeneity became a legal protected identity. But for diasporic persons, it became beneficial to colonial and hegemonic forces deny indigeneity and nativity.

But back to the question: am I Yellow or Brown?

By Vrata - CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6602967

The Austronesian peoples are named so because they speak languages that are part of the language family that most likely originated in Taiwan, also known as Formosa, where the most branches of this family are found among the natives of the island. There are 'as many as nine first-order subgroups of Austronesian' while off of Taiwan, including it's offshore islands, all of the languages belong to the Malayo-Polynesian, or Extra-Formosan, branch. The diversity among the languages of native Taiwanese is 'greater than that in all the rest of Austronesian put together, so there is a major [linguistic] genetic split within Austronesian between Formosan and the rest'.

The similarities in the languages of the Southeast Asia Archipelago and the Pacific islands was noticed written about as far back as 1706 by a Dutch scholar and the first extensive study taking place in the early 20th century. By and large, Austronesian languages contain between 15-20 consonant sounds and 4-5 vowel sounds, 'at the lower end of the global typical range of 20-37 sounds'. There are outliers, such as Nemi of New Caledonia, which has 43 consonant sounds. Words are usually formed in the shape of CV(C)CVC, with C = consonant and V = vowel. Most languages place limits on what consonants can go together in the middle of a word while it is common for a drift to occur that will also limit the sounds that can occur at the end, or even eliminating it. Most of the languages are agglutinative languages, meaning that words are formed through the process of stringing prefixes (morphemes that go before), suffixes (morphemes that go after), and sometimes infixes (morphemes that are are inserted to a word) to a base word, and frequently use reduplication to change the meaning of a word, such as the full reduplication of the Karo Batak nipe-nipe to make caterpillar out of snake (nipe), while others use partial reduplication, such as the Agta use of at-atu to make puppy from dog (atu).

Broadly, Austronesian grammar falls into three groups which are known as Philippine-type, Indonesian-type, and post-Indonesian type. The Philippine-type has 'three or four verb voices [that] determine which semantic role the "subject"/"topic" expresses (it may express either the actor, the patient, the location and the beneficiary, or various other circumstantial roles such as instrument and concomitant)…word order has a strong tendency to be verb-initial'. Indonesian-type 'reduced the voice system to a contrast between only two voices (actor voice and "undergoer" voice), but these are supplemented by applicative [a grammatical voice that promotes an oblique argument of the verb] morphological devices…which modify the semantic role of the "undergoer"…these languages mostly tend towards verb-second word-orders'. Post-Indonesian no longer have a voice system and 'the voice-marking affixes no longer preserve their functions'.

Cognate sets, or 'sets of words from multiple languages, which are similar in sound and meaning which can be show to descend from the same ancestral word in Proto-Austronesian according to regular words', are widely studied. Some cognate sets are relatively obvious, such as 'mata' meaning 'eye' in many Austronesian languages, from northern Taiwan through to the southern Māori. Other words are less obvious, such as the word 'two', which 'require[s] some linguistic expertise to recognise' as in Bunun, spoken in central Taiwan, it is 'dusa', in Amis, on the east coast of Taiwan, it is 'tusa', and in Māori, it is 'rua'. The Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database (ABVD), a 'comprehensive inventory of basic vocabulary lists' for about 1000 Austronesian languages also connects cognates.