The Orang Laut language or ''Loncong'', is one of the

Malayic languages The Malayic languages are a branch of the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of the Austronesian language family. The two most prominent members of this branch are Indonesian and Malay. Indonesian is the official language of Indonesia and has evolved ...

. It is one of several native languages of

Orang Laut The Orang Laut are several seafaring ethnic groups and tribes living around Singapore, Peninsular Malaysia and the Indonesian Riau Islands. The Orang Laut are commonly identified as the Orang Seletar from the Straits of Johor, but the term may a ...

('Sea People') of the Bangka and

Belitung Belitung (Belitung Malay: ''Belitong'', formerly Billiton) is an island on the east coast of Sumatra, Indonesia in the Java Sea. It covers (including offshore islands such as Mendanau Island), and had a population of 309,097 at the 2020 Cen ...

islands in

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...

, and may be two distinct languages. Anderbeck considers there to be an Orang Laut genetic grouping of languages, which includes the Kedah, Riau, and Sekak subgroups. The Malayic language Duano is divergent, and does not form part of this group.

References

Sources

*Anderbeck, Karl. 2012
The Malayic-speaking; Orang Laut Dialects and directions for research
Wacana, 14(2): 265-312. *Blench, Roger. 2016. "The linguistic background to Southeast Asian sea nomadism". In ''Sea nomads of Southeast Asia: past and present''. Bérénice Bellina, Roger M. Blench & Jean-Christophe Galipaud eds. Singapore: NUS Press. * Moseley, Christopher and R. E. Asher, ed. ''Atlas of the Worlds Languages'' (New York: Routelage, 1994) Languages of Indonesia Malayic languages {{malayic-lang-stub