Malagasy is the westernmost Austronesian language and belongs to the South East Barito subgroup of the Western Malayo-Polynesian subfamily (Dahl 1988, Rasoloson & Rubino 2005). Dahl (1951) presents widely-accepted evidence that Malagasy is most closely related to the Indonesian language Ma’anyan of Kalimantan (South Borneo). The term Malagasy refers to a macrolanguage (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2014), with many regional dialects distributed throughout the island of Madagascar, which lies off the east African coast across from Mozambique (see Figure 1) and has a population of over 22 million (INSTAT 2018). The central area of the country, or the ‘Central Highlands’, is a plateau of up to 5000 feet and includes the capital city of Antananarivo, with a metropolitan population of about four million. The dialect historically spoken in and around Antananarivo is called Merina, and it served as the primary basis for development of the standardized, institutional language referred to as Malagasy Ofisialy ‘Official Malagasy’ (OM).

Kejom [k̀ɘd͡ʒɔ́m], the preferred autonym for the language more commonly known as Babanki, is a Central Ring Grassfields Bantu language (ISO 693-3: [bbk]) spoken in the Northwest Region of Cameroon (Hyman 1980, Hammarström et al. 2017, Simons & Fennig 2017). The language is spoken mainly in two settlements shown in Figure 1, Kejom Ketinguh [k̀ɘd͡ʒɔ́m ↓kɘ́tÍⁿɡ̀uʔ] and Kejom Keku [k̀ɘd͡ʒɔ́m ↓kɘ́k̀u], also known as Babanki Tungoh and Big Babanki, respectively, but also to some extent in diaspora communities outside of Cameroon. Simons & Fennig (2017) state that the number of speakers is increasing; however, the figure of 39,000 speakers they provide likely overestimates the number of fluent speakers in diaspora communities. The two main settlements’ dialects exhibit slight phonetic, phonological, and lexical differences but are mutually intelligible. The variety of Kejom described here is the Kejom Ketinguh variant spoken by the second author; all data and examples which we take into account are based on his speech.

Urarina (ISO 639-3, code ura – Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2016) is an Amazonian language isolate spoken in the Loreto Region of Peru. Most Urarina communities are located on the banks of the rivers Corrientes, Chambira and Urituyacu, which are tributaries of the Marañon River, which in turn is the mainstem source of the Amazon River. Figure 1 shows the map of Peru and the location of the Urarina territory.