| Abstract: The debate on the dating of the Acehnese-Chamic subgrouping has been inactive for nearly twenty years. However, new data on the Acehnese sub-lects and the interior mainland Chamic languages, and the historical studies of the Champa kingdom provide more clues about the Acehnese ancestors’ time of migration into Sumatra. Using an etymological analysis approach, this study shows that despite being the first to leave the Chamic groups, Acehnese shares more innovation with the mainland Chamic languages than previously thought. This suggests that Acehnese might have left the group within a close time frame to the highland Chamic languages, which subgrouped in the 10th century CE. Based on the 8th century CE Javanese raids to the southern area of the Southeast Asia mainland, recorded in a Chamic inscription, the disappearance of the Linyi name from the Chinese records around the same date, the appearance of the Lamuri kingdom with its Austroasiatic toponymy, and the historical findings on Srivijaya power across Southeast Asia, all suggests that the Acehnese’s Indochina-Sumatra migration is likely to have occurred around the middle of the 8th century CE. The final location of this first Chamic migration to Sumatra indicates that it was an ntentional
relocation rather than an emergency refuge. Furthermore, post-Proto-Chamic-breakup (PC) innovations and borrowings on the mainland are also found in higher numbers than previously reported. This finding proves the post-PC-breakup Chamic dispersal into Aceh-Sumatra, as Thurgood once claimed, to occur in the 15th century AD. Yet, the variants across dialects for these post-PC-breakup words reported in the present study open a probability of an earlier date of this second wave of Chamic-speaking migrants’ arrival in Sumatra. |