Siraya

Siraya villages stood across the plains of southwestern Taiwan, among them Sinkan, Mattau and Soulang. Their people spoke an Austronesian language and lived in distinct communities with their own relationships and rivalries. In the seventeenth century the Dutch East India Company established itself nearby, drawing these villages into diplomacy, conflict and missionary activity. The missionary Georgius Candidius arrived at Sinkan in 1627 and learned its language. Dutch missionaries introduced a Roman alphabet for writing Siraya and taught local people to use it. Long after the Dutch were expelled in 1662, Siraya speakers continued to write documents in their language, leaving the manuscripts known as the Sinkan texts.