Halmaheran

The Halmaheran grouping corresponds to the Raja Ampat–South Halmahera branch of the South Halmahera–West New Guinea subgroup of Austronesian, extending from southeastern Halmahera to the Raja Ampat, or Four Kings, islands off New Guinea's Bird's Head Peninsula. It includes Maba on Halmahera and Ma'ya in Raja Ampat. Contact with Papuan languages left unusual features: Ma'ya has three lexically distinctive tonemes.

Islam arrived in the fifteenth century through contact with the Bacan Sultanate. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the kingdoms of Waigeo, Salawati, Sailolof and Misool, bound to Tidore through the Biak-born war leader Gurabesi, formed the Raja Ampat tributary network.

The Portuguese navigator Jorge de Menezes first sighted the islands for Europeans in 1526, and William Dampier charted the strait that bears his name in 1699. The archipelago later passed into the Dutch colonial sphere with Tidore's other Papuan dependencies.