They are spoken in the central part of Flores, one of the Lesser Sunda Islands in the eastern half of Indonesia.
[1][3] They completely lack derivational and inflectional morphemes, and core grammatical relations are mostly expressed by word order.
This process is characteristic for the development of pidgins and creoles, most of which display strong simplification of the source language.
[4][5][6] McWhorter's (2019) hypothesis of adult acquisition and subsequent creolization is dismissed by Elias (2020), who proposes that the isolating character can better be explained by a pre-Austronesian substrate language, which must have had the typological features of the Mekong-Mamberamo area.
[7][8] There remains to explain why the ikat from Ngadha are the only such Floresian textiles to bear distinctive motifs of stick figures such as what may be encountered in prehistoric imaging;[9] and what to make of the legends that talk of living side by side with some 'little people' until only a few centuries ago - said legends being very strong still in central Flores, less so in the west and inexistent in the east, a repartition which indicates a population movement of outsiders coming from the west.