Tanimbar

The Tanimbar grouping corresponds to the Kei-Tanimbar languages, a small Central Malayo-Polynesian family scattered over the Kei and Tanimbar archipelagos and the north coast of New Guinea's Bomberai Peninsula. Its best-known member is Keiese, self-named Veu Evav, the lingua franca of the Kei islands; the family also includes Fordata, Yamdena and Selaru.

Each island and village has its own dialect, and Dutch Catholic missionaries first wrote Keiese in a Roman-letter alphabet. Kei oral history recalls Balinese aristocrats arriving in the Majapahit era, along with migrants from other islands. Two villages on Kei Besar preserve Banda, brought by refugees from the nutmeg-producing Banda Islands.

Portuguese navigators sighted Tanimbar around 1525 and charted it from the 1560s. The islands later entered the Dutch colonial sphere, exporting trepang, tortoiseshell and copra.