Maluku

The Maluku grouping represents the Central Maluku languages, a proposed branch of the Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian group of Austronesian comprising about fifty tongues on Seram, Buru, Ambon and the Sula Islands. Central Moluccans regard Seram, still called Nusa Ina or Mother Island, as their ancestral homeland.

Buru is first named in a Javanese poem of around 1365, and in the 1400s and 1500s Seram lay within the sphere of the Sultanate of Ternate, often ruled through its vassal on Buru. A Portuguese expedition mapped Seram's southern coast in 1512.

The Dutch Company took Buru in 1658, resettling villages around Kayeli Bay to work its clove plantations, and held nominal sway over Seram from about 1650. Tidore kept suzerain rights in eastern Seram from 1700 to 1768, and Prince Nuku of Tidore made the island a base of his anti-Dutch rebellion in the 1780s.