Moluccan

The Moluccan family groups the Central Malayo-Polynesian languages of the Banda Sea, spoken on the Lesser Sunda and Maluku islands. Austronesian settlers reached these islands roughly four thousand years ago, and linguists treat the family as a linkage of related branches rather than a single tight unit, its varieties shaped by older Papuan substrates.

The Malukus were the Spice Islands of medieval trade, their nutmeg and cloves drawing Javanese, Malay and Arab merchants; the Old Javanese eulogy Nagarakertagama mentions the region in 1365, and Islam entered with Arab traders in the fourteenth century.

Malay served as the lingua franca of the ports, and the Ternate sultan's letters of the 1520s were written in it, while the Portuguese reached Ambon in 1512 and the Dutch arrived in 1599, drawing the islands into European colonial rivalry.