Bornean

Bornean gathers the indigenous Malayo-Polynesian languages of Borneo that linguists place within the Greater North Borneo group: the Dusunic and Murutic languages of Sabah, the Kenyah and Punan languages, and Melanau and the related Kajang tongues of central Sarawak.

They descend from Austronesian settlers who entered Borneo from the Philippines and split into communities along the north-western and eastern coasts. Most of these societies were oral ones, and their languages long absorbed loanwords from Malay, the trade lingua franca of the coasts.

The Melanau, among the earliest settlers of Sarawak and self-styled river people, came under strong Bruneian Malay influence from the thirteenth century. Brunei also ruled and taxed the Dusun farmers of the Sabah interior, whose name means people of the orchards. A British survey of 1774 described them as mountain agriculturalists with a dialect of their own.