More than 500 years ago, Malay was carried by Malay-speaking migrants in their voyages from Borneo to the eastern seas. The Bacan community is a diaspora community of Malay speakers who migrated the furthest from the western archipelago. A close examination of this Bacan dictionary will demonstrate the complrxity of its affixation and reduplication systems as well as the genitive and agentive marking systems. This complex morphology suggests the retention of an older grammatical system now lost in standard Malay and Indonesian. Similarly, the dictionary contains archaic woeds and meanings, no longer used in the standard languages. Nonetheless, this dictionary also indicates the impact of other languages in particular the local languages of North Maluku. Indeed, the language of the Bacan community has diverged and become a language closely related to Malay but no longer mutually intelligible with Malay or Indonesia. Sadly, the number of speakers of the Bacan language has declined dramatically in the last 40 years. Perhaps, this Bacan-English dictionary of only 4087 entries with an appended English-Bacan index, can assist the Bacan community in the revitalization of the Bacan language and encourage the publicarion of reading materias in print and multimedia forms.
