Tambora was a language spoken on the island of Sumbawa in what is now Indonesia, in the area devastated by the catastrophic 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora. Described as the westernmost known Papuan language, it was unusual among such languages for being associated with a maritime trading state rather than an isolated inland community. The eruption killed the great majority of its speakers and effectively ended the language, leaving behind only a short word list collected by Stamford Raffles; scholars continue to debate whether it should be treated as a true isolate, but the surviving vocabulary points to a language fundamentally unrelated to the Austronesian languages that surround it.
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