The papers assembled in this collection deal with the early linguistic sources on the languages of the Philippines and Micronesia. Tagalog, Bikol, Cebuano, Iloko, Chamorro and sundry languages of the area and beyond are featured in the papers. The focus is on the first descriptive work devoted to these languages and subsequent early treatments and their potential interdependency. Several papers also address the issue of how “modern” the early grammarians of Philippine languages were and to what extent they did typological linguistics avant la lettre.

The collection is a pioneer contribution to the history of descriptive linguistics in Southeast Asia and the West Pacific. Moreover it offers a window to the past for the interested members of the modern speech communities of the languages covered by the papers.