Kaingang and Austronesian – Similarities between Geographically Distant Languages

The paper shows that significant similarities exist between two geographically distant language families: the Kaingang family, comprising Xokleng and Kaingang, spoken in South Eastern Brazil, on the Atlantic, and Austronesian, spoken in the Pacific. These similarities pertain to kinship semantic patterns, structural features and lexicon. In the paper, I sketch kinship and grammatical similarities and discuss in more detail the lexicon, paying special attention to various modes of arguing for significant similarity. One plausible explanation of the results found is a distant relationship between these families, a conclusion corroborated also by some extralinguistic facts. If such a hypothesis turns out to be true, one important implication would be some prehistoric contact between these distant parts of the world