The dialects belonging to the Tamanic subgroup are Embaloh, Kalis and Taman. They are spoken in the Hulu kapuas Regency of West Kalimantan near the head of the Kapuas River and its tributaries thereabouts. Until very recently, the information available on Tamanic dialects was restricted to wordlists. Much of the vocabulary in these lists agrees with Malay, but there are also some lexical items which are in striking agreement with South Sulawesi languages, and more particularly with Buginese. As a result, some scholars have classified Tamanic in the Malayic subgroup on the basis of lexicostatistics or exclusively shared lexical innovations (Blust 1981; Nothofer 1988), whereas other scholars have tended to classify it with South Sulawesi languages on the basis of rather impressionistic arguments (von Kessel 1850; Hudson 1978). During a one month field trip in the Embaloh area in January 1989 I was able to collect a sufficiently large corpus of data on this language to show on phonological, morpho-syntactic and lexical grounds that the Tamanic languages were more closely related to South Sulawesi languages than to the Malayic ones. Compare some of the shared lexical innovations between Embaloh and the South Sulawesi languages:^[12]

PMP *tubuq ‘body’; Proto-South Sulawesi *kale ‘id.’, Embaloh kale ‘self; body’;

PMP *qiDuŋ ‘nose’; Proto-South Sulawesi *iŋi(C), Embaloh i ŋar ‘id.’;

PMP *muqa, *(q)away, *paras, *daq ə y ‘face (of head)’; Proto-South Sulawesi *lindo, Embaloh lindo ‘id.’;

PMP *[lnø]ipə n ‘tooth’; Proto-South Sulawesi *isi, Embaloh isi ‘id.’;

PMP *liqə R ‘throat, neck’; Proto-South Sulawesi *killo ŋ, Embaloh kalo ŋ;

N.B.: When used verbally, Embaloh kaloŋ means ‘to invoke’ or ‘to call’, whereas many South Sulawesi languages also use the reflex of *killoŋ as the root for a verb ‘to sing’;

PMP *butuq, *qutiq ‘penis’; Proto-South Sulawesi *laso, Embaloh laso ‘id.’;

PMP, Proto-South Sulawesi (no proto-form available); South Toraja ulelean, Embaloh ule?ule?an ‘account, story’;

PMP *waDa ‘to be, exist’; Proto-South Sulawesi *dia(n), Embaloh dien ‘id.’;

PMP, Proto-South Sulawesi (no proto-form available); Makassarese, South Toraja taraue, Buginese tarau?, Embaloh tatara?ue? ‘rainbow’;

PMP *t(ui)DuR ‘sleep’; Proto-South Sulawesi *tindo, Embaloh tindo?.

A close Tamanic-South Sulawesi relation automatically raises the question as to whether the South Sulawesi languages have their homeland in Borneo, or whether the Tamanic languages have their homeland in South Sulawesi. Furthermore, what is the exact relation between Tamanic and South Sulawesi languages: are both derived from a higher order proto-language, are the Tamanic languages a subgroup of the South Sulawesi ones, or are the South Sulawesi languages a subgroup of the Tamanic ones? Although the number of exclusively shared lexical innovations seems to be at least as high between Embaloh and Tae’ (South Toraja) as between Embaloh and Buginese, there are some striking phonological agreements which compel me to assume a closer relation between Tamanic languages and Buginese than between Tamanic languages and other South Sulawesi languages. These phonological agreements are the reflex s for PMP *j in intervocalic position in both Tamanic and Buginese, whereas the other South Sulawesi have r, and furthermore the sporadic loss of PMP/Proto-South Sulawesi *p in a set number of Tamanic and Buginese words.

Compare:

PMP *j > Buginese and Embaloh s, South Sulawesi languages (minus Buginese) r:

PMP *pajə y ‘paddy’ > Proto-South Sulawesi *paze; Buginese ase, Embaloh ase (Makassarese, Mandar, South Toraja pare);

PMP *qalə jaw ‘day’ > Proto-South Sulawesi *ilzo; Buginese ə sso, Embaloh aso (Makassarese, Mandar, South Toraja allo);

PMP *ajan ‘name’ > Proto-South Sulawesi *azan; Buginese as əŋ , Embaloh asan (Makassarese are ŋ);

PMP *laja ‘burn (a wound)’; ‘be hot (spices)’; Buginese lasa ‘sick’, Embaloh ba-lasa ‘be strong’ (Makassarese lara ‘sour, bitter, e.g. a grapefruit’);

PMP *siji ‘to winnow’ > Proto-South Sulawesi *sizi; Buginese sise? (Ide M. Said 1977: sise), Embaloh sese (South Toraja siri).

Loss of PMP/Proto-South Sulawesi *p:

PMP *pusuq ‘heart’ > Proto-South Sulawesi *puso ‘id.’; Buginese uso ‘heart-shaped blossom of the banana-tree’, Embaloh uso? ‘heart-shaped tip of a banana fruit-stem’;

PMP *pajə y ‘paddy’ > Proto-South Sulawesi *paze; Buginese ase, Embaloh ase ‘id.’;

Proto-South Sulawesi *sa(m)po ‘house’ (Mills 1981:75); Buginese sao, Embaloh sao ‘id.’;

PMP *piliq ‘choose’ > Proto-South Sulawesi *pile; Buginese ile, Embaloh ile? ‘id.’;

PMP *punti ‘banana’ > PSS *punti ‘id.’; Buginese utti, Embaloh unti ‘id.’.

The fact that there are many shared lexical innovations in Embaloh and Tae’ (South Toraja) may be the result of the fact that Tae’ speakers, who only relatively recently converted to Christianity, have in many ways been less subject to changes from outside cultures than for instance the Buginese and Makassarese, their Muslim relatives.

If, as seems to be the case, Tamanic is more closely related to Buginese than to other South Sulawesi languages, it has to be included in the South Sulawesi language group in a subgroup with Buginese (or with Buginese and Campalagian, cf. Grimes and Grimes [1987] and Sirk [1989]).

It is evident that the Tamanic-Buginese link has no connection with the Buginese migrations to the coasts of East, South and West Borneo from at least the 17th century on. The Buginese kept their identity or merged with the local Malays. Their migration to Borneo is a more recent phenomenon in comparison to a Buginese-Tamanic split, which must have preceded the Islamization of South Sulawesi. It must have happened so long ago that it allowed the Tamanic speakers to adapt and assimilate to a considerable degree to their Bornean environment, and to forget their “exo-Bornean” origin.

As to the original homeland of Tamanic, as a consequence of its apparent membership of the South Sulawesi language group it is most likely that at some point in time its speakers have left South Sulawesi and have migrated to Borneo.