Favorlang

Favorlang is an extinct language of the Western Plains branch of the Formosan languages within the Austronesian family, historically spoken in Taiwan and closely related to the Babuza language, with some scholars proposing it developed into Babuza. It is known primarily from a 1650 vocabulary compiled by the Dutch missionary Gilbertus Happart, later translated into English in 1840, from religious texts produced by the Dutch pastor Jacobus Vertrecht between 1647 and 1651, and from early twentieth-century field notes collected by Naoyoshi Ogawa. The linguist Paul Jen-kuei Li treats Favorlang as a separate language very closely related to Babuza, though the roughly two-and-a-half-century gap between Favorlang's seventeenth-century documentation and Babuza's early twentieth-century recording complicates determining their exact relationship.