Sailors, Tailors, Cooks, and Crooks: On Loanwords and Neglected Lives in Indian Ocean Ports T O M H O O G E R V O R S T* E-mail: hoogervorst@kitlv.nl A renewed interested in Indian Ocean studies has underlined possibilities of the transnational. This study highlights lexical borrowing as an analytical tool to deepen our understanding of cultural exchanges between Indian Ocean ports during the long nineteenth century, comparing loanwords from several Asian and African languages and demonstrating how doing so can re-establish severed links between communities. In this comparative analysis, four research avenues come to the fore as specifically useful to explore the dynamics of non-elite contact in this part of the world: (1) nautical jargon, (2) textile terms, (3) culinary terms, and (4) slang associated with society’s lower strata. These domains give prominence to a spectrum of cultural brokers frequently overlooked in the wider literature. It is demonstrated through con- crete examples that an analysis of lexical borrowing can add depth and substance to existing scholarship on interethnic contact in the Indian Ocean, providing methodolo- gical inspiration to examine lesser studied connections. This study reveals no unified linguistic landscape, but several key individual connections between the ports of the Indian Ocean frequented by Persian, Hindustani, and Malay-speaking communities. Keywords: Indian Ocean, lexical borrowing, loanwords, cultural contact, sailors, textile, food. Introduction Cultural vocabulary tends to overstep ethno-linguistic boundaries with relative ease. In the case of the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean, it is thanks mostly to Amitav Ghosh’s best-selling novel Sea of Poppies that this fascinating story of lexical cross- fertilisation “from below” has not yet sunk into the depths of oblivion. 1 He drew ample inspiration from the wealth of data left by colonial-era lexicographers, such as Lieutenant Thomas Roebuck—a professional linguist with a more than keen eye for sailing matters. Yet the diverse cadre of sailors at the core of such treatises have influenced the linguistic landscape of the Indian Ocean more significantly than any Itinerario, Vol. 42, No. 3, 516–548. © 2018 Research Institute for History, Leiden University doi:10.1017/S0165115318000645 use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115318000645 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. McMaster University Library, on 02 Jan 2019 at 02:03:15, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of