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Endangered Languages of Austronesia

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Endangered Languages of Austronesia edited by M A RG A R E T F LO R E Y

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Editorial matter and organization: Margaret Florey 2010 © The chapters: their various authors 2010 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published by Oxford University Press 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 978–0–19–954454–7 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents List of Plates List of Maps, Figures, and Tables Notes on Contributors List of Abbreviations

vii viii x xiii PART I

OVERVIEW

1 Introduction Margaret Florey

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2 Language Documentation in the West Austronesian World and Vanuatu: An Overview Alexander K. Adelaar

PART II

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LINGUISTIC VITALITY: THEORY, ASSESSMENTS, AND CHALLENGES

3 Language Endangerment Scenarios: A Case Study from Northern Central Sulawesi Nikolaus P. Himmelmann

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4 Digging for the Roots of Language Death in Eastern Indonesia: The Cases of Kayeli and Hukumina Charles E. Grimes

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5 Maintaining Vera in Rongga: Struggles over Culture, Tradition, and Language in Modern Manggarai, Flores, Indonesia I Wayan Arka

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6 Why the Philippine Negrito Languages are Endangered Thomas N. Headland

PART III

110

CAPACITY BUILDING AND REVITALIZATION INITIATIVES

7 New Directions in Field Linguistics: Training Strategies for Language Documentation in Indonesia Margaret Florey and Nikolaus P. Himmelmann

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Contents

8 Anxious Respect for Linguistic Data: The Paciﬁc and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) and the Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity (RNLD) Nick Thieberger 9 Preserving and Promoting Indigenous Languages in Vanuatu: Possibilities and Constraints Hannah Vari-Bogiri 10 Waima’a: Challenges for Language Documentation and Maintenance in East Timor John Hajek and John Bowden 11 To Be or Not to Be: Challenges Facing Eastern Penan in Borneo Peter Sercombe PART IV

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172 191

PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES TO REVITALIZATION AND MAINTENANCE

12 Digital Transmission of Language and Culture: Rethinking Pedagogical Models for E-Learning D. Victoria Rau and Meng-Chien Yang

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13 Neverver: A Study of Language Vitality and Community Initiatives Julie Barbour

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14 First Language Education in Multilingual Contexts in the Philippines Catherine Young

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References Index of Subjects Index of Place Names Index of Languages

257 286 295 299

List of Plates 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Last known speaker of Leliali [Chapter 4] Agta man with bow and arrows in the 1960s [Chapter 6] Headland eliciting cooking terms from Agta man [Chapter 6] Agta man making ﬁre by friction [Chapter 6] Fire-making kit [Chapter 6] Agta boy shooting arrows [Chapter 6] Agta teens playing basketball [Chapter 6] Janet Headland recording Agta tale [Chapter 6] Workshop 1 (2006) participants and tutors [Chapter 7] Tutor Wayan Arka working with participants Jermy Balukh and Luh Anik Mayani [Chapter 7] Johanis Soriale and Bonik Amalo learning to capture and transcribe data [Chapter 7] Nikolaus Himmelmann tutoring Mariana Lewier and Dira Hildayani [Chapter 7] Participant Yusuf Sawaki learning Toolbox during Workshop 2 (2007) [Chapter 7] DVDs sent from the ﬁeld for archiving with PARADISEC [Chapter 8] Tama Bawang [Chapter 11] Umian Paing and family [Chapter 11]

List of Maps, Figures, and Tables Maps 1.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 8.1 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4

The Austronesian language family Major dialects of the Buru language (1989) Immigrant settlements on Buru (1989) Indonesia showing Maluku and central Maluku Villages from which the Dutch relocated populations Probable linguistic picture prior to 1650 The Languages of Flores Island Density of items in the PARADISEC collection, an image from the search tool Vanuatu within the Paciﬁc Vanuatu with speciﬁc places marked Santo showing Araki in relation to Tangoa and Luganville town Pentecost Island showing the two largest languages: Raga in the north and Apma (the language to which the Sowa language has shifted) in the south 10.1 Locations of East Timorese ‘national languages’ and dialects 11.1 Borneo Island with areas inhabited by Penan 13.1 Location of Neverver speakers among other indigenous languages in North-Central Malakula

4 77 77 80 81 86 91 153 160 161 165 167 174 192 227

Figures 2.1 4.1 8.1 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 14.1 14.2

Classiﬁcation of Austronesian languages Speech communities on Buru Island Workﬂow for ﬁle transformations Participants in Yami e-learning Representation of proposed model Map of the course to the proposed model The pedagogical template Components of strong and sustainable MLE programmes Model for the phases of a three language multilingual education programme

15 76 147 212 218 220 221 248 254

Tables 3.1 4.1 6.1 7.1

Tomini-Tolitoli languages and major dialects Examples of lexical differences between Buru, Kayeli, and Hukumina Negrito languages spoken in the Philippines Evaluation of Workshop 1

49 78 112 139

List of Maps, Figures, and Tables 7.2 8.1 9.1 10.1 11.1 11.2

Evaluation of Workshop 2 A sample of Austronesian data in the PARADISEC collection Araki a dying language vs. Raga an active language Inventory of Waima’a consonant phonemes Penan and educational attainment Lexical cultural borrowings in Penan

ix 140 154 164 185 197 201

Notes on Contributors ALEXANDER K. ADELAAR is an afﬁliated member of the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His main research interests are in Austronesian comparative-historical linguistics, especially with regard to Indonesian/Malay and the languages of west and south Borneo, Madagascar, and Taiwan. Among his many publications, Sander is author of Salako or Badameà. Sketch Grammar, Texts and Lexicon of a Kanayatn Language (West Kalimantan) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2005), Proto-Malayic: A Reconstruction of its Phonology and Part of its Morphology and Lexicon (1992) and is co-editor of The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar (2005). I WAYAN ARKA is a Fellow in Linguistics at the Research School of Paciﬁc and Asian Studies at The Australian National University and is lecturer in linguistics at Udayana University, Indonesia. His research interests include lexically based linguistic theories, language typology, language documentation, and Austronesian languages of Indonesia. He worked on the Rongga Documentation Project (2004–06), funded by the Hans Rausing ELDP, SOAS London. JULIE BARBOUR is an Assistant Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Waikato. Julie is working on a major language documentation project with the Neverver speech community of Malakula Island in Vanuatu. She is also assisting the Neverver speech community with the early phases of vernacular literacy development. Her research interests include descriptive and documentary linguistics, linguistic typology, anthropological linguistics, and vernacular literacy. JOHN BOWDEN is a Fellow in Linguistics at the Research School of Paciﬁc and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. He has a long-standing interest in the languages of the east Nusantara region and has conducted major studies of Taba in north Maluku and Waima’a in East Timor. MARGARET FLOREY is a Senior Fellow in the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is an experienced ﬁeld linguist with endangered languages in Central Maluku, eastern Indonesia. She is actively involved in advocacy and international capacity building activities with members of Indigenous communities, particularly in Indonesia, the Netherlands, and Australia. Her research interests include the minority languages of the Austronesian and Australian language families, language endangerment, language documentation, and ethnobiology. She has published extensively on the endangered languages of the Austronesian region. Margaret serves on the Board of Governors of Terralingua, is a co-convenor of the Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity, and chairs the steering committee for the International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics. She has also contributed as an international expert at the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Section Experts’ Meetings on the Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage and was a member of the Organizing Committee for the inaugural InField (UC Santa Barbara). CHARLES E. GRIMES was born and raised in Mexico, educated at Cornell University and earned his doctorate in linguistics at the Australian National University in 1992. Chuck has been

Notes on Contributors

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working in central and eastern Indonesia since 1981 and has published a variety of descriptive and comparative studies on languages in Sulawesi, north and central Maluku, and east Nusa Tenggara, particularly around the Timor region. His most in-depth research has focused on the Buru language of central Maluku. He has also done additional work on Malay-based creoles and endangered vernacular languages in the region. Chuck has lectured at a number of universities around Southeast Asia, Australia, and the US, and at SIL schools in the US, Singapore, and Australia. He has been Principal of the Asia SIL school when it was located in Singapore. He is also an Adjunct Fellow in Linguistics at the Research School of Paciﬁc and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. JOHN HAJEK is Associate Professor in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. He has worked for many years on the languages of East Timor. One special area of research activity involves Waima’a, a small Austronesian language spoken in the east of the country. THOMAS N. HEADLAND is an international anthropology consultant with SIL International, and adjunct Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Arlington. He also teaches anthropology each summer at the University of North Dakota. His PhD is in ecological anthropology. He and his wife, Janet Headland, have been studying Agta Negrito foragers in the Philippines for most of the last forty-six years. Their most recent ﬁeld trip to the Agta people was in 2008. His research interests include human ecology in tropical forests, Indigenous human rights, endangered languages, and Austronesian linguistics. He has published ten books and 100 scholarly articles and his research has been described in numerous science magazines and in over 100 newspapers. The major publication of his career (4,000 pages) will be published online in 2008, titled Agta Demographic Database: Chronicle of a Hunter-Gatherer Community in Transition. NIKOLAUS P. HIMMELMANN is Professor and Chair of Linguistics at the Westfälische WilhelmsUniversität Münster, Germany. His major research interests include typology, grammaticization theory, prosody and grammar, as well as language documentation and description. He is the author of an in-depth study of the typology and grammaticization of demonstratives and articles (Deiktikon, Artikel, Nominalphrase, 1997) and co-editor of The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar (2005), Secondary Predication and Adverbial Modiﬁcation (2005) and Essentials of Language Documentation (2006). He has done ﬁeldwork in the Philippines, Sulawesi, and East Timor, and published widely on a number of core issues in Austronesian grammar, including the nature of lexical and syntactic categories and voice. D. VICTORIA RAU is Professor of Intercultural Studies at Wheaton College, USA. Her research interests are in sociolinguistic variation and applied linguistics with a focus on the Austronesian languages of Taiwan. She has published a major book on Yami Texts with Reference Grammar and Dictionary (2006), co-authored with Maa-Neu Dong, and is leading research projects on Yami language documentation and rethinking e-learning pedagogy, collaborating with Dr MengChien Yang. PETER SERCOMBE is Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University, UK. He worked in Borneo from 1982 to 2002. His academic interests include cultural maintenance and adaptation, multilingualism, and the sociolinguistics of language use and language change, with particular reference to minority groups. His publications include ‘Ethnolinguistic Change:

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Notes on Contributors

Some Preliminary Observations among the Penan of Brunei’ (Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 152 (2): 1996), ‘Adjacent Cross-Border Iban Communities: A Comparison with Reference to Language’ (Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 155 (4): 1999), ‘Language Maintenance and Shift: A Review of Theoretical and Regional Issues with Special Reference to Borneo’ (in Methodological Issues in Language Maintenance and Shift, M. David (ed.), Berlin: Lang Verlag, 2002), ‘Multilingualism among the Penan of Brunei’ (International Journal of Bilingualism, 7 (2): 2003) and the book Beyond the Green Myth: Hunter-Gatherers of Borneo in the 21st Century (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2007, edited with Bernard Sellato). NICK THIEBERGER is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Nick established the Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre (Port Hedland, Western Australia) in the late 1980s. He moved to the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in 1991 where he developed the Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive. He was an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne where he was also Project Manager with the Paciﬁc and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) and co-convenor of the Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity. He is working with South Efate and Lelepa, two Oceanic languages of Central Vanuatu. He has developed software (Audiamus) for working with digital ﬁeld recordings. A DVD of media linked to example sentences and texts accompanies his grammar of South Efate (UH Press, 2006). He is very interested in the ways in which we can improve our work practices as linguists using new technologies. HANNAH VARI-BOGIRI is a lecturer in the School of Language, Arts, and Media at the University of the South Paciﬁc. She holds a BA, PGDipArts, and Med (Hons), GCert in Tertiary Teaching, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of the South Paciﬁc. She is a native of Araki. Her ﬁrst language is Tangoa and she also speaks Raga and is currently teaching in Port Vila. Her research interests include multilingualism, language and culture and sociolinguistic issues. Her publications include ‘A Sociolinguistic Survey of Araki: A Dying Language of Vanuatu’ (in the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 26 (1): 2005), and ‘Possessive Classiﬁer bila- in Raga Reﬂects Value in People’ (in Language Description, History and Development, J. Siegel, J. Lynch, D. Eades (eds.), Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007). She is currently the National Coordinator for the UNESCO project on the Preservation and Revitalization of the local languages in Vanuatu. She is also assisting with the production of a dictionary of Raga, from Pentecost Island. MENG-CHIEN YANG is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences and Communication at Providence University, Taiwan. He is collaborating with Dr Victoria Rau on research projects on Yami language documentation and rethinking e-learning pedagogy. Meng’s publications include Constructing the M-learning Environment: An Intelligent Adaptive Web Learning Materials Clipper (DigiLife 2006) and Digital Transmission of Language and Culture (2006 with Rau). CATHERINE YOUNG is a Multilingual Education Consultant with SIL International, the Philippines. She has conducted linguistic research among the Palawano, Brooke’s Point in southern Philippines. Catherine has served as an education consultant and trainer with language communities throughout the Philippines in conjunction with both the Philippines Department of Education and NGOs.

List of Abbreviations 3p

third person

AILDI

American Indian Language Development Institute

AILLA

Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America

AN

Austronesian

ANLC

Alaska Native Language Center

CALL

Centre for Australian Languages and Linguistics at Batchelor Institute in the Northern Territory

CLL

Community Language Learning approach

DEL

Documenting Endangered Languages program (US National Science Foundation)

DELAMAN

Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archive Network

DoBes

Documentation of Endangered Languages (Volkswagen Foundation, Germany)

ELAN

Eudico Linguistic Annotator

ELAP

Endangered Languages Academic Programme

ELAR

Endangered Languages Archive

ELDP

Endangered Languages Documentation Programme

ELP

Endangered Languages Programme (Intangible Cultural Heritage Section at UNESCO)

EOPAS

Ethnographic Online Presentation and Annotation System

HRELP

Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (United Kingdom)

ICCs

Indigenous Coordination Centres

ICFP

Instituto Católico para Formação de Professores in Baucau

ICH

Intangible Cultural Heritage

ICT

information and communication technology

IGT

interlinear glossed text

INL

Instituto Nacional de Linguística (located within the National University of East Timor)

KWF

Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino/Commission on the Filipino Language LGUs Local Government Units

MALEI

Matigsalug Literacy Education Incorporated

MECYS

Ministry of Education, Culture, Youth, and Sports

MLE

multilingual education

xiv

List of Abbreviations

MOE

Ministry of Education in Taiwan

NCIP

National Commission on Indigenous Peoples

OKMA

The Association Oxlajuuj Keej Maya’ Ajtz’iib’

OLAC

Open Language Archives Community

PARADISEC

Paciﬁc and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures

PCER

Presidential Commission on Educational Reform

PI

principal investigator

RNLD

Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity

SIL

Summer Institute of Linguistics

STSI

Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia (Bali’s National Institute of Art)

TEK

Traditional Ecological Knowledge

TGN

Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

TLP

Translation and Literacy Programme

VOC

Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (The Dutch East India Trading Company)

PART I Overview

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1 Introduction Margaret Florey

1.1 Introduction The emergent ﬁeld of language endangerment and language revitalization has come to greater international attention through this decade with increased publicity about the mounting threats to the world’s linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity. A growing body of literature has elucidated the critical issues and is raising awareness among indigenous communities and language activists, the ﬁelds of linguistics and allied disciplines, government agencies, non-government organizations, and the general public about the urgent need for responses at all levels to support endangered languages and cultures (for example, Abley 2003; Crystal 2000; Dalby 2003; Fishman 2001a; Grenoble and Whaley 1998a, 2006; Harmon 1996; Harrison 2007; Hinton and Hale 2001; Janse and Tol 2003; Mafﬁ 2001; Nettle and Romaine 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas et al. 2003; Tsunoda 2005). Our knowledge about the precarious situation facing indigenous languages in speciﬁc areas of the world has been expanded through reports, monographs and edited collections such as McConvell and Thieberger (2001) and McConvell (2005) for Australia; Miyaoka et al. (2007) for the Paciﬁc; Rim, RCAP (1996) for Canada; and Brenzinger (1998) for Africa. However, the Austronesian language family remains seriously under-researched and under-represented in the literature on language shift and revitalization. This volume aims to redress that gap by exploring responses to the challenges facing Austronesian language communities today.

1.2 The Scope of this Book Both geographically and in terms of number of languages, the Austronesian language family is among the largest in the world. Some 1268 languages (or approximately 20 per cent of the world’s linguistic resources) are spoken by more than 270 million people in a region that extends 15,000 kilometres from Madagascar in the west to Rapanui (Easter Island) in the east (Adelaar 2005a; Gordon 2005). Approximately 500 of those languages are spoken in the island states of the Oceanic branch of Malayo-Polynesian.

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Map 1.1 The Austronesian language family1

However, a mere count of languages in this linguistically diverse language family belies the level of endangerment and the urgent need for documentation and revitalization (see Florey 2005a, and Adelaar in this volume). This book canvasses a range of language endangerment scenarios encountered across Austronesia. It does not aim to be representative of the languages of the Austronesian region, or of the countries in which those languages are spoken. Rather, it seeks to exemplify the variety of responses by linguists working in alliance with members of Austronesian language communities to what is increasingly being recognized as an endangerment crisis, and thus focuses selectively on areas in which much of the contemporary language documentation work is taking place. The chapters in this book were all invited from researchers who are actively involved in language documentation and who are cooperating in the development of innovative language revitalization and capacity building strategies. The authors draw on their work in Vanuatu and in the western Austronesian nations of Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and East Timor. Contributors were asked to focus on their own research and training activities with Austronesian language communities in relation to the themes of documentation and archiving, capacity building (the training of indigenous linguists and language workers), revitalization strategies, materials and/or software development, pedagogical approaches (including e-learning, literacy and orthography development), and the challenges which language activists, communities, and linguists face in revitalizing Austronesian languages. Some 200 Austronesian languages are the subject of discussion in Chapters 3–14, and an

1 Map redrawn and reproduced with permission from Darrell Tryon (ed.) 1995. Comparative Austronesian Dictionary: An Introduction to Austronesian Studies (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter).

Introduction

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additional 200 are covered in Adelaar’s overview of language documentation projects in Chapter 2.

1.3 Key Issues The chapters are organized thematically into four sections, which are described in the following section. However, a number of key issues recur across those sections. We are currently witnessing the rapid development of methods and technologies in the young ﬁeld of language documentation, and several of the chapters provide deﬁnitions and detailed discussions of the documentation process, data management, new software, and archiving and the preparation of metadata (see in particular Chapters 2, 5, 8, and 10). Local, national and international policy development vis-à-vis indigenous languages are considered in reference to Vanuatu (Chapters 9 and 13), East Timor (Chapter 10), the Philippines (Chapter 14), and Indonesia (Chapter 5), and illustrate the (potential) impact of such policies on language revitalization. As languages with oral traditions are documented for the ﬁrst time, the development of orthographies and the preparation of literacy materials has arisen as a critical issue for Neverver (Chapter 13), Araki and Raga in Vanuatu (Chapter 9), Waima’a in East Timor (Chapter 10), Rongga in Indonesia (Chapter 5), Yami in Taiwan (Chapter 12), Kalinga in the Philippines (Chapter 14), and Eastern Penan in Borneo (Chapter 11). The ethics and responsibilities of ﬁeldwork also emerge as a theme as authors negotiate the ground between their goal of working within a participatory framework, the wide-ranging needs of the communities, and the various limitations posed and possibilities permitted by diverse national policies (see Chapters 7, 11, 13, and 14). Several authors also discuss situations in which a language community was initially not ready to engage with language revitalization issues. In these cases, top-down strategies were ﬁrst employed to build capacity and raise community awareness of language endangerment and interest in language revitalization. Rau and Yang, for example, outline a status building strategy for Yami in Chapter 12, and Arka (Chapter 5) and VariBogiri (Chapter 9) note that the documentation phase triggered grassroots interest and that revitalization activities later followed for Rongga and Araki respectively.

1.4 Themes and Chapters The chapters in this volume are organized thematically into four parts. 1.4.1 Overview Chapter 2 continues the introduction to this volume and provides an overview of the Austronesian language family for readers who may be less familiar with that part of the world. Adelaar begins by considering the history and classiﬁcation of Austronesian languages, noting the wide range of population sizes across speech communities.

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Focusing primarily on the regions covered by the chapters in this book (the western Austronesian world and Vanuatu), Adelaar provides a country-by-country summary of the documentary and descriptive research that has taken place through the past twenty years. He highlights the role of the four major international organizations which are currently providing the greatest support for the documentation of endangered Austronesian languages—the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (HRELP), the Endangered Languages Programme (DoBes) of the Volkswagen Foundation, UNESCO’s Endangered Language Programme (ELP) within its Intangible Cultural Heritage Section, and the US National Science Foundation’s Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) program. Particular attention is given to the important role that SIL members have played in documenting and describing almost 300 western Austronesian languages. Adelaar’s chapter contributes an extensive bibliography of published and web-based resources, and also takes into account Austronesian languages that are spoken in diaspora countries, including Surinam, the Netherlands, Comoros, and Sri Lanka. 1.4.2 Linguistic vitality and theoretical issues in language endangerment The four chapters in Part II explore case studies which offer assessments of linguistic vitality in Indonesia and the Philippines and support the development of a theory of language endangerment. This section deepens our understanding of the impact of changes to the linguistic ecosystem (Mühlhäusler 1996) and, in particular, of the economic factors and marginalization of indigenous peoples that are intrinsic to language shift situations. In Chapter 3, Himmelmann proposes that language endangerment results from an endangerment scenario, held to be a speciﬁc and complex constellation of factors that co-occur to impact on language use and linguistic vitality in a given community. Himmelmann draws a distinction between the observable symptoms of language shift and their causes, noting that it is the former that have often received the greater attention in the literature. Within his framework, language endangerment is deﬁned as a rapid decline in the number and quality of domains in which a given language is used. Case studies of language endangerment scenarios from the eleven TominiTolitoli languages of Sulawesi Island in Indonesia are used to test this approach, and further evidence is drawn from Grimes’ analysis of language shift in two languages on Buru Island in Chapter 4. Himmelmann argues that our understanding of the causes of language shift will best be advanced by a typology of endangerment scenarios. Grimes suggests that we need a long view of the past and perhaps a long view of the future to understand the dynamics underlying language shift or obsolescence that have been set in place over centuries. Grimes witnessed the Kayeli and Hukumina languages of Buru Island in eastern Indonesia moving towards silence in the last two decades of the twentieth century. In Chapter 4, he draws on the history of Buru Island and the wider region to provide a long view for these two cases, for which very few

Introduction

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documentary materials exist. Kayeli exempliﬁes a situation in which a language group remained in its homeland but was inundated over several hundred years by outsiders, while Hukumina illustrates the fate of a powerless community removed from its place of origin. Grimes later broadens his study to examine similar language scenarios from Ambon and Seram Islands. This chapter further demonstrates Himmelmann’s postulate that a cluster of factors commonly combines to endanger minority languages. Chapter 5 extends the documentation of endangered languages into the sphere of cultural heritage. Arka discusses the vulnerability of Vera, a ritual dance and music tradition that transmits and perpetuates Rongga identity, history, and cultural knowledge. Threats to Vera have arisen through conversion to Catholicism, modern education, and shifts of interest and the loss of Rongga language skills among young people in Flores, Indonesia. Arka places the safeguarding of Vera within the framework of UNESCO’s 2003 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage, and argues that documentation and research are an integral part of maintenance and revitalization. The second half of this chapter introduces both ethical and technical aspects of the modern ﬁeld of language documentation. Arka details the requirements of this new ﬁeld vis-à-vis archiving, including the preparation of the accompanying metadata which ensures ongoing access to the data by a wide audience, including the speaker community, beyond the life of a speciﬁc project. The breadth of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) that is lost when cultural practices undergo radical change is carefully illustrated in Chapter 6, in which Headland discusses Casiguran Agta ethnobiology. Over a forty-year period of living and working in the Philippines with the Agta, Headland documented the language and the indigenous knowledge of its speakers. He draws in particular on the semantic domains of hunting and ﬁre-making to demonstrate the impact of rapid lifestyle change on the language. Headland argues that this case adds strength to Grenoble and Whaley’s (1998b: 29) contention that the languages of hunter-gatherer populations are under more extreme pressure than groups with other kinds of socioeconomic organization. 1.4.3 Capacity building and revitalization strategies The chapters in Part III attend to the need for capacity building strategies to facilitate community directed language documentation and revitalization. International attention has been given to this issue in, for example, the papers in Austin (2003, 2004) and David et al. (2007). In this book, ﬁve complementary responses from Vanuatu, East Timor, Indonesia, and Borneo highlight the development of a more participatory linguistics, in which alliances are being built between linguists and language activists working towards the shared goal of revitalizing minority languages and cultures (Florey 2008; Penﬁeld et al. 2008). In Chapter 7, Florey and Himmelmann discuss the planning and development of two training workshops in language documentation and revitalization skills

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for Indonesian linguists and language activists. The authors argue that in-country programs are the best means of ensuring widespread and high quality documentation in the linguistically diverse and resource-poor Asian countries in which Austronesian languages are spoken. Florey and Himmelmann evaluate the outcomes of the two language documentation workshops, and question the sustainability of capacity building activities which are embedded within individual linguistic ﬁeld research projects. The authors argue that it is critical to develop training programs which build towards autonomy and indigenizing the academy (Mihesuah and Wilson 2004), and suggest that a language centre model might best meet this goal. Chapter 8 considers the question of sustainability from the perspective of data management. Thieberger contends that new technologies in language documentation permit ﬁeld linguists to better support their analyses, to provide citable archival forms of data, and to repatriate materials more easily to the host community. However, these beneﬁts derive from and require disciplined workﬂow and data management both in the ﬁeld and in later phases of processing data. Thieberger maps methods for best practice in documentation, and in the preparation of metadata and the archiving of data (audio and video recordings, notes, photos, etc.) to ensure their durability and accessibility into the future for a wide range of stakeholders. In this case too, training in the use of new technologies and archiving practices is seen as a crucial step in ensuring their uptake. Thieberger draws on the methods he employed during the documentation of South Efate, a language of central Vanuatu, and in his experience in developing and operating the Paciﬁc and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC). This searchable linguistic archive already contains a signiﬁcant collection of Austronesian data, including both legacy materials and the output of recent documentation projects. The focus on Vanuatu continues in Chapter 9, in which Vari-Bogiri discusses a range of activities at the grassroots and national level that will potentially impact on the future linguistic vitality of two languages, Araki and Raga. While the more isolated Raga is still actively spoken, Araki has become seriously threatened by the introduction of non-indigenous religious practices and the associated shift to Tangoa. However, Vari-Bogiri points to a number of positive actions which have grown out of a language awareness workshop in Araki, including documentation of traditional stories and practices, adult literacy classes and the production of Araki literacy materials, and the introduction of Araki in the kindergarten. Vari-Bogiri also notes that the government of Vanuatu is now recognizing the threat to indigenous languages posed by the ofﬁcial languages English, French and Bislama. Initiatives to support languages include Constitutional recognition of the value of diversity, development of a Vernacular Education Policy, and the establishment of the Vanuatu National Language Council. Recent activities initiated by the government, such as the declaration of Kastom Ekonomi years in 2007 and 2008, have also begun to raise the status of traditional practices and are likely to further strengthen the aspects of Raga knowledge of and interaction with the environment which are highlighted by the author.

Introduction

9

Chapter 10 tackles the complex social and linguistic situation in the youngest Austronesian nation, East Timor. Hajek and Bowden review the several key phases in the history of the linguistic situation in East Timor and demonstrate that, ironically, the status of its approximately sixteen indigenous languages is more threatened since independence than was the case through the centuries of Portuguese colonization and Indonesian occupation. The ofﬁcial roles played by Portuguese, Tetum, Indonesian, and English have exacerbated the struggle for survival by the indigenous languages, as demonstrated by the case of Waima’a which Hajek, Bowden, and their research partners have been documenting for the last several years. This chapter highlights the challenges of organizing and managing a documentation project in the circumstances of the development of East Timor, and also addresses some of the difﬁculties of implementing a capacity building program. Training was an important goal of the project in order to assist in developing local academic skills in documentation and revitalization. Although the research team was not able to realize this goal at the national level, the authors report on successes at the local level to support Waima’a language maintenance in to the future. The range of outcomes includes training in the use of software and technologies, the compilation of an electronic archive for Waima’a, the collaborative development of an orthography, and the production of sets of teaching materials. In the ﬁnal chapter in this section, the background to a language maintenance project among the Eastern Penan in Sarawak and Brunei is ﬁrst set by examination of the history of these people and the issues currently posing risks to the vitality of their language. Sercombe’s chapter returns to the theme raised by Headland in Chapter 6 of the particular struggles faced by hunter-gatherer populations. Like the Casiguran Agta in the Philippines, the Penan population level is stable, yet the shift from nomadism to permanent settlement is seeing a concomitant loss of traditional cultural practices and threats to the Penan’s indigenous knowledge. Sercombe has begun working with the community to compile a dictionary of Penan. In keeping with the goals of modern language documentation, this project aims to contribute to language revitalization through providing training, raising the status of Penan, and supporting a ﬁrst language literacy program in the primary school. 1.4.4 Pedagogical approaches Pedagogical approaches to language revitalization and maintenance are explored in depth in Part IV with chapters focused on e-learning, vernacular literacy programs, and bilingual and ﬁrst language education. In Chapter 12, Rau and Yang discuss an e-learning program for the Yami language of Taiwan. The authors propose that this could be a suitable model for building e-learning programs for other endangered indigenous languages. Yami has been the focus of a long-term documentation project by Rau, who advocates for the importance of ongoing community consultation and collaboration. This chapter outlines a later phase in the project that saw an

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interdisciplinary project team built speciﬁcally to target Yami language revitalization strategies. The authors argue that the teaching of Yami to a non-indigenous student body in a university setting permitted testing of their method and was a valuable status building strategy which increases the visibility of the endangered language and culture nationally and internationally. This project also used a workshop approach to listen to community strategies for revitalization, further raise language awareness, enhance community involvement, and address orthography issues. Chapter 13 exempliﬁes a project in which a linguist was asked to support community efforts to document and revitalize a language. Barbour reports on several years of collaborating with community members on the Neverver project in Vanuatu. UNESCO’s (2003) assessment model is used to demonstrate the relative vitality of Neverver in the two villages in which it is spoken. In accord with Vari-Bogiri’s comparison of Araki and Raga in Chapter 9, Barbour’s analysis underlines the association between relative isolation of a setting and the strength of linguistic vitality. The Neverver project built on earlier work by a community language activist and required the linguist to mediate sensitively between the work done by the elderly speaker and the community. Barbour considers the role, ethics and responsibilities of the linguist at some length in this chapter, and demonstrates how broad this role has become in recent years. Project activities included recording oral narratives, work towards a Neverver dictionary, documenting ethnobotanical knowledge, revising and continuing the development of a Neverver hymn book, and producing resource materials in Neverver for a vernacular kindergarten literacy program. Future community goals include collaborative Bible translation, which Barbour suggests may raise the status of Neverver alongside Bislama and English and extend its use into the domain of religion. The issue of ﬁrst language education is extended in Chapter 14, in which Young promotes the value of mother tongue literacy to support language maintenance in the Philippines and, critically, to enhance educational outcomes for children in minority language communities. The author draws on case studies from Obo Manobo and Tagakaulo Kalagan in Mindanao and Lubuagan Kalinga in Luzon to outline the stages which need to be undertaken in program development, and highlights the importance of community participation and management. These cases also demonstrate the value of building partnerships which bridge across all levels, from language communities to local organizations and government bodies, and which draw on the cooperation of linguists, educators, and international advocates.

1.5 Conclusion There can be no doubt that, across the predominantly Austronesian speaking countries, too little is known about too many of the languages, and a great amount of documentation work remains to be done. Yet the chapters in this volume serve to demonstrate that Austronesian languages are now the focus of a signiﬁcant number of projects which are creating and employing novel strategies in both documenting

Introduction

11

and revitalizing endangered languages. Participatory practice and capacity building resonate as core components in most modern projects. Workshop models developed for Austronesian communities are being taken up internationally. Linguists are learning and sharing new skills in training, materials production, and the development of educational programs, and are increasingly playing advocacy roles in the preparation of national and international policy. We hope that the cases and strategies presented here will continue to strengthen Austronesian languages, and that they may also serve as useful examples for language communities in other parts of the world.

2 Language Documentation in the West Austronesian World and Vanuatu: An Overview Alexander K. Adelaar

2.1 Introduction In this chapter I try to give an indication of the wide range of linguistic projects that have been undertaken through the past twenty years. As noted in the introduction to this volume, the coverage in this book leans primarily towards the western Austronesian region (Southeast Asia and Madagascar), and it also takes in the languages in Vanuatu because that country is currently the focus of quite intense documentation. My overview does not purport to be either complete or uniform in all the areas it tries to cover, but highlights the attention which is now being paid to linguistic documentation of west Austronesian and Vanuatuan languages. It is difﬁcult to provide a comprehensive overview because the information on research either currently in progress or recently completed is not registered systematically. While there are now many web pages that give a wealth of information, they are not always complete and updated. A good number of the contemporary projects reported here are being undertaken within the framework of documentary linguistics outlined by Himmelmann (1998), Gippert et al. (2006), and Woodbury (2003). Within that framework, documentation involves a maximally large corpus of speech samples reﬂecting as much variation The present chapter could never have been written without the committed support of many friends and colleagues. I would like to thank the following people for their help: Sascha Aikhenvald, Karl Anderbeck, Umberto Ansaldo, I Wayan Arka, Gill Buck, Juergen Burkhardt, Adrian Clynes, Christine Dreiheller, Robert Early, Margaret Florey, Noel Gueunier, John Hajek, Nelleke and Jim Johansson, Multamia Lauder, Hsiu-chuan Liao, Ritsuko Kikusawa, David Mead, Ricardo Nolasco, Stephen Quakenbush, Phil Quick, Laurie Reid, Peter Slomanson, Karla and Jim Smith, Jim Stahl, Uri Tadmor, Grace Tan, René Van den Berg, Lalani Woods and Elizabeth Zeitoun. Special thanks to Nelleke Johansson who prepared a nine-page report on SIL activities in Sabah for the purpose of this chapter. Anthony Jukes made editorial comments on an earlier draft. The undoubtedly many errors and omissions in this account are my sole responsibility.

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as possible and being constantly added to; its data are transparent (i.e. sufﬁciently annotated to be usable by a wider audience), and it should be available to as many users as possible; it should be preservable (with information about each data item), capable of being transferred to other archiving systems, and obtained and used ethically, that is, it should meet the wishes of those who provided the information (Woodbury 2003:46–8). In addition to these documentation projects, I also aim to give an overview of the major descriptive projects that are being carried out beyond the purely documentary framework: that is to say, grammars and dictionaries that have been published in the last twenty or so years or that are still in manuscript form. Where information is readily available, I also mention the existence of text collections and literacy materials. Occasionally, this information is already provided in existing bibliographies or extensive reference lists, in which case I refer instead to those sources. I present the data according to the country to which they traditionally belong, treating these countries in a west to east order, from Madagascar to Vanuatu. I treat data from the Austronesian diaspora separately at the end of the chapter. I occasionally give information about language vitality, particularly for areas that have not been covered well in other sources and areas with which I am more familiar through my own research. While doing so I tend to concentrate on structural conditions applying to language vitality rather than on numbers of languages that are disappearing or becoming extinct. Some regions that are not primarily Austronesian are left uncovered in this chapter. They include Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore, and Hainan in the People’s Republic of China. Other regions remain ‘underexposed’, such as the Philippines, and West Papua in Indonesia. These are all areas I am not directly familiar with, and for which information about language documentation is not easily obtained. In Section 2.2, I give an overview of the Austronesian language family, including very basic information about spread, genetic afﬁliations, history, typology of Austronesian languages as well the number of Austronesian languages and the size of some of its speech communities. In Section 2.3, I list the organizations that are preoccupied with language documentation and revitalization. In the remaining sections, I treat language documentation in Madagascar (Section 2.4), Malaysia (Section 2.5), Indonesia (Section 2.6), Brunei (Section 2.7), Taiwan (Section 2.8), the Philippines (Section 2.9), East Timor (Section 2.10), and Vanuatu (Section 2.11). In a ﬁnal section I discuss language documentation in the diaspora countries, where Austronesian speech communities have ended up in recent times: Surinam, the Netherlands, Comoros, and Sri Lanka (Section 2.12).

2.2 The Austronesian Language Family: Spread, History, Classiﬁcation, and Other Information Austronesian languages occupy an area larger than any other language family except Indo-European. They are spoken in the Paciﬁc from Hawai’i in the northeast, Taiwan

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in the northwest, Easter Island in the southeast, New Zealand in the southwest, and Wallis Island in the south. In Southeast Asia they are spoken in the Philippines and in most parts of Indonesia, Malaysia, and East Timor. Minorities speaking Austronesian languages are also found in some parts of Vietnam, in southwest Thailand, and along the coasts of southwest Burma and west Thailand. Much further to the west, speakers of Austronesian languages are found in Madagascar, along the east African coast. Finally, as a result of migrations in historical times, small Austronesian-speaking communities ended up in Australia (with Malay speakers in the Cocos Keeling Islands, Christmas Island, and the northwest Australian town of Broome), southwest China (a tiny group of Utsat speakers on Hainan Island), Cambodia (Malay and Cham speaking communities), Sri Lanka (Malay-speaking communities in Kandy, Colombo, and along the southwest and southeast coast), Surinam ( Javanese speakers), the Comoros (two Malagasy dialects spoken on the island of Mayotte), and the Netherlands (with Moluccan Malay and Javanese speaking communities as well as speakers of Moluccan languages, some of which are already extinct in eastern Indonesia). A notable exception in the Southeast Asian and Paciﬁc interface is New Guinea, where the languages are largely non-Austronesian (or ‘Papuan’), although New Guinea has many Austronesian enclaves along its coast. Other exceptions are some of the islands in the vicinity of New Guinea, where non-Austronesian (‘Papuan’) languages have survived in what have become predominantly Austronesian-speaking areas. These islands include Halmahera and Timor to the west of New Guinea, and New Britain, New Ireland, Bougainville, and the Solomon Islands to its east. The languages of the Australian continent also have different, non-Austronesian language afﬁliations. Archaeological evidence suggests that the ﬁrst Austronesian-speaking community lived some 8,000 years ago in coastal China in an area facing Taiwan. From there, members of the community must have crossed the sea to Taiwan, where today the twenty-odd Austronesian languages are genetically more diverse than anywhere else in the Austronesian world. This genetic diversity indicates that the Austronesian stock language (‘Proto Austronesian’) ﬁrst began to diverge and branch off into various daughter languages in Taiwan some 6,000 years ago. It split into possibly ten different basic (or ‘ﬁrst-order’) branches. Nine of these are represented in Taiwan only and engendered the so-called ‘Formosan languages’. A tenth branch called ‘MalayoPolynesian’ includes all Austronesian languages spoken outside Taiwan, together more than 1,200 in number. Evidence indicates that members of the Malayo-Polynesian branch left Taiwan and crossed over to the Philippines some 4,500 years ago (2500 BC), and from there onwards spread further into Indonesia and Timor, and, later on, into the Paciﬁc (ca. 1400 BC), mainland Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Malayo-Polynesian speakers settled in places like central Vietnam some 2,300 years ago (Bellwood 1997:120, quoting Robert Blust). The permanent human settlement of Madagascar is probably only ﬁfteen centuries old (or less), and that of New Zealand some eight centuries. Most of the settlement of the Malay peninsula by Austronesians happened less than a thousand years ago, although Malays may have been living in

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Proto Austronesian

Formosan

Malayo-Polynesian

Western M-P

Central Eastern M-P

Central M-P

Eastern M-P

South Halmahera West-New-Guinea

Oceanic

Figure 2.1 Classiﬁcation of Austronesian languages according to R. A. Blust (1999)

Kelantan (northeast Malaysia) and Pattani (in neighbouring south Thailand) for a much longer time. The Malayo-Polynesian languages, which, it is remembered, include all Austronesian languages except the Formosan languages of Taiwan, are difﬁcult to classify. Robert Blust distinguishes a West Malayo-Polynesian and Central-East MalayoPolynesian division, with the latter splitting up further into Central Malayo-Polynesian and East Malayo-Polynesian (see Figure 2.1). East Malayo-Polynesian in turn has two subgroups, one being the South Halmahera—West New Guinea subgroup, and the other Oceanic. While East MalayoPolynesian and its lower divisions are well attested, the same cannot be said of the other subgroups. The Central-East Malayo-Polynesian and Central Malayo-Polynesian subgroups are deﬁned on the basis of linguistic features that are also found in languages outside these subgroups. These features are therefore not critical for the deﬁnition of these subgroups (Adelaar 2005a:24–5). West Malayo-Polynesian languages seem to have some features in common and are almost all spoken in the western part of the Austronesian world in a contiguous area covering all of the Philippines, western Indonesia, and areas further to the west. However, as a subgroup they are basically a ‘rest’ category: they are deﬁned in a negative way, namely as the Malayo-Polynesian languages that are not Central-East Malayo-Polynesian. This in itself is not enough to qualify them as a distinct genetic subgroup, and more research is needed to determine beyond reasonable doubt whether or not they qualify as such (cf. Blust 1999:68). In terms of numbers of speakers, Austronesian speech communities come in all sizes. The 75 million speakers of Javanese form the largest Austronesian speech community and the eleventh largest language community in the world. Malay has considerably fewer ﬁrst language speakers, and it is moreover spoken in a variety of sometimes very divergent dialects. However, as a national language (in the form of

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Indonesian or ‘Bahasa Indonesia’ in Indonesia, or ofﬁcial Malay in Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore), it is used as a second language by well over one hundred million speakers (although exact ﬁgures are hard to obtain). Other Austronesian languages with speech communities of more than one million are Cebuano (20 million), Tagalog (14.5), Ilokano (8), Hiligaynon (7), Bikol (5), Waray-waray (almost 2.5), Pampangan (1.9), Maguindanao (1), and Pangasinan (1) in the Philippines; Sundanese (27), Madurese (13.7), Minangkabau (6.5), Balinese (3.9), Batak varieties (together 7), Buginese (3.5), Acehnese (3), Sasak (2.1), and Makassarese (1.6) in Indonesia (Gordon 2005), and Malagasy (14) in Madagascar (Rubino and Rasoloson 2005:456). Indonesia has reportedly more than 18 million speakers of various Malay varieties, and 22.8 million speakers of Indonesian; Malaysia has 7.18 million Malay speakers as a mother tongue. These ﬁgures for language speakers are from Ethnologue (Gordon 2005). However, it has to be borne in mind that many of the ﬁgures in this source are approximate, and some are in need of revision. 1 Apart from Malay, Austronesian languages which have become a national language are Filipino (based on Tagalog) in the Philippines, and Tetum in East Timor, as well as Fijian in Fiji, and a few other Oceanic languages.

2.3 Organizations Involved in the Documentation and Revitalization of Austronesian Languages There are four major international organizations that are directly concerned with the documentation of endangered languages, to wit the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (HRELP) in the United Kingdom, the Endangered Languages Programme (DoBes) of the Volkswagen Foundation in Germany, the Endangered Language Programme (ELP) of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Section at UNESCO, and the Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) program of the National Science Foundation in the United States of America. They are all inﬂuential in supporting the growth of the modern ﬁeld of language documentation internationally, and each of them has sponsored projects in the Austronesian areas under investigation in this volume. The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project supports research, training, and archiving for endangered languages throughout the world (http://www.hrelp.org) and is administered by the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. It has three programmes. The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) provides research grants, the Academic Programme (ELAP) 1 For instance, the ﬁgures for Lampung (1.5) and Rejang (1) speakers are almost certainly inﬂated. They possibly reﬂect the number of ethnic Lampung and Rejang people instead. Also the large number of Betawi speakers in Jakarta (2.7) may be due to a confusion of original Betawi speakers (which are very small in number these days) and speakers of Jakarta Indonesian, which adopted many features from Betawi Malay. Ethnologue (Gordon 2005) is also inclusive in its policy towards language distinctions. Numbers of languages listed for certain areas are sometimes inﬂated due to a lack of information regarding the status (as a dialect or a language in its own right) of a speech form vis-à-vis other speech forms in those areas.

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runs postgraduate courses in Field Linguistics and Language Documentation and Description, and the Archive Programme (ELAR) archives and disseminates language documentations. The Volkswagen Foundation is a sponsor of academic research in Germany. In 2000 it set up the DoBes 2 Programme for the documentation of endangered languages, with the aim of documenting languages that are in immediate peril of disappearance (http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES). DoBes speciﬁes that the resulting data should be useful for the academic community as well as for the respective speech communities and should be presented in such a way that they can be understood by the former and can be used by the latter. In 2006, the DoBes Programme was funding some thirty projects. Those dealing with Austronesian languages were the Waima’a project (East Timor), the Totoli project (North Sulawesi, Indonesia) and the Sri Lanka Malay Project, as well as projects regarding the Marquesan, Saliba, Teop, and Vurës/Vera’a languages in the Paciﬁc. The Intangible Cultural Heritage Section of UNESCO has had an Endangered Language Programme 3 (ELP) since 2001. It contributes to the promotion of the linguistic diversity in the world by raising awareness on language endangerment, promoting writing systems and the documentation of non-written languages, ensuring the participation of speaker communities in revitalizing their own languages, stimulating good practices in language preservation, and mobilizing international cooperation. Interest in language endangerment at UNESCO began after the launch of the ‘Red Book of Languages in Danger of Disappearing’, a database with information about the state of language endangerment in different parts of the world (which can be accessed via the website www.tooyoo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ichel.html). The Red Book was put together at the initiative of Stephen A. Wurm in 1993. In 1995, UNESCO established an International Clearing House for Endangered Languages at Tokyo University, and a year later it published the ﬁrst edition of the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing (Wurm 1996, 2nd edn 2001). UNESCO also has an afﬁliated organization in Japan—the Asia-Paciﬁc Cultural Centre for UNESCO. 4 The Documenting Endangered Languages program (DEL) is a funding partnership between the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Smithsonian Institution in the United States of America. It supports ‘ﬁeldwork and other activities relevant to recording, documenting, and archiving endangered languages, including the preparation of lexicons, grammars, text samples, and databases. As such it also aims to exploit advances in information technology’. 5 There are of course other organizations supporting the documentation and preservation of languages, but these have as a rule a wider scope of aims and activities. 2

DoBes stands for Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen or ‘Documentation of Endangered Languages’. Also known as ‘Safeguarding of Endangered Language Programme’. See http://www.unesco.org/ culture/heritage/intangible/endangeredlanguages/index.shtml. 4 See http://www.accu.or.jp/en/index.shtml. 5 See http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=12816. 3

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Research councils and academic funding institutions have always provided funds for linguistic research and are now beginning to support language documentation, which is increasingly becoming a linguistic sub-discipline in its own right. Any stocktaking of initiatives to preserve the linguistic wealth in the Austronesianspeaking world should certainly include an overview of the activities of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, or SIL. The original goal of this organization was not language preservation, but bible translation. It started the documentation and description of the languages in areas where it intended to deploy missionary activities. It acted on the assumption that prospective converts would accept Christianity more readily if its message were communicated through their own language, and this required a bible translation into the languages in question. That said, nowadays SIL is evolving more in the direction of a non-proﬁt NGO organization preoccupied with the preservation of minority languages in general, and with the wellbeing of their speakers in a broader sense. It is also by far the largest single organization involved in the study and preservation of languages (cf. Quakenbush 2007). Although matters like these are difﬁcult to quantify, the language materials it produces make up for possibly one third of all linguistic descriptive data that are being collected globally. Their activities are not limited to language description but also include the development of orthographies and literacy programs as well as education in a broader sense, including livelihood skills. SIL has been active in Southeast Asia since 1953, where it currently has four regional branches: SIL Mainland Southeast Asia Group, SIL Indonesia Branch, SIL Malaysia Branch, and SIL Philippines Branch. 6 Its members have researched over 140 languages in Indonesia, 20 languages in Malaysia, and 105 languages in the Philippines. The Pusat Bahasa (the National Language Centre in Jakarta, Indonesia, sponsored by the Indonesian government) has been publishing language descriptions, dictionaries, sociolinguistic surveys, and other studies concerning regional languages for more than 30 years. It has done so in spite of its ofﬁcial policy, which used to be biased towards languages of more than one million speakers. Although sometimes of a preliminary nature and mixed quality, these Pusat Bahasa studies are an important contribution to the documentation of Indonesian languages. The Pusat Bahasa has also launched and supported the ‘Research on Cognates and Mapping of Regional Languages in Indonesia’ Project (Penelitian Kekerabatan dan Pemetaan Bahasa di Indonesia). This project started in 1992 and includes the collection of words and basic sentences for a large number of regional languages as well as social and geographical data concerning informants and the villages where each language is spoken, and audio recordings of origin myths (with transliteration) of these villages (Lauder 2006:40–4). 6 See SIL International in ASEAN. Partners in Language Development, a brochure issued by SIL International—Asia Area Ofﬁce (www.sil.org). It provides the following contact emails for its Asian branches: SIL International Asia Area Ofﬁce: [email protected]; SIL Indonesia Branch: info_indonesia@sil. org; SIL Mainland Southeast Asia Group: [email protected]; SIL Malaysia Branch: [email protected]; SIL Philippines Branch: [email protected].

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2.4 Documentary Linguistic Projects in Madagascar Madagascar has a population of about 14 million (Rasoloson and Rubino 2005:456). 7 Its traditional language, Malagasy, is spoken in a large number of dialects which are by and large mutually intelligible. These dialects are usually represented as coinciding with ethnic distinctions (the ‘tribes’) bearing the same name, but in reality they often do not. For instance, the Sakalava and Betsimisaraka tribes each speak several dialects which are not signiﬁcantly closely related. The main dialect, Merina, is one of the most intensively studied and best documented Austronesian languages, and it became the basis of the national standard language. The written literature of one of the regional varieties, Taimoro, is at least six centuries old. Other languages spoken on the island are French and languages spoken by recent migrants. There used to be a Swahili-speaking community on the island of Nosy Be, but nowadays there are reportedly no speakers left. Another Bantu language, Makua (native to Mozambique), was once spoken in pockets all over the country but is now also practically extinct (cf. Gueunier 2003:152, which includes a 45-page Malagasy Makua lexicon). While there is no cause for concern about the vitality of Malagasy in general, its status as an ofﬁcial language is seriously undermined by the use of French. As the language of administration of the former colonizers, French is in competition with standard Malagasy in every public domain. It is also the medium of instruction at universities and high schools. Three factors contribute to this state of affairs: the prestige of French in former French colonies, the ongoing promotion of French in these countries, and competition of Malagasy regional tribes resenting the political and linguistic hegemony of the Merina (cf. Steinhauer 2005:80). Regional dialects, on the other hand, generally display a healthy vitality and their roles as mother tongue and home language are not impaired by either French or ofﬁcial Malagasy (Professor N. Gueunier, e-mail communication). There seem to be no projects focusing on language documentation in the contemporary sense in Madagascar. On the other hand, there are many grammatical studies, course books, dictionaries and other linguistic publications of Merina Malagasy (whether in its regional form or as an ofﬁcial language), including the rich and complete Malagasy–French and French–Malagasy dictionaries by Webber (1853, 1855) and the Rakibolana Malagasy by Rajemisa-Raolison (1985), a Malagasy-Malagasy explanatory dictionary with illustrations modelled after the French Larousse dictionary (see Dez 1988, Rasoloson and Rubino 2005, and Randriamasimanana 2007 for an inventory of scholarly works). 8 The various bilingual dictionaries for Malagasy use French, English, Russian, or German as a medium language. 7

Gordon (2005) gives 17.5 million as the population ﬁgure of Madagascar. Of these inventories, Randriamasimanana’s References on Malagasy language and linguistics (http://folk.uio.no/janengh/gassisk/, 29-8-2007) is the most extensive one, although it has several bibliographic omissions regarding Malagasy linguistic history. 8

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The study of regional varieties is patchy, and many dialects need further study, although there are various grammatical sketches and dictionaries, including recent dictionaries of Bara (Elli 1988), Tandroy (Rajaonarimanana and Lee 1996), and Tanala (Beaujard 1998a), the last two of which have a grammar sketch in the introduction. There are also recent lexical studies involving ‘Arabico-Malagasy’, the language of a corpus of secret texts held by the Antaimoro aristocracy, which contain fragments in Antaimoro Malagasy, Arabic, and a mixed Arabic-Malagasy ‘pidgin’ called Kalamo Tetsitetsy (Beaujard 1998b:5). There are no ofﬁcial documentary linguistic projects involving Malagasy dialects. However, Ritsuko Kikusawa (National Museum of Ethnology, Japan) conducted ﬁeldwork in the north Betsimisaraka region for six months intermittently in the years 2003–5. She has collected texts and data on regional dialect variation and is currently preparing a description of north Betsimisaraka. Noa Mishimoto, an MA student from Kyoto University, is collecting data on the Tandroy dialect.

2.5 Malaysia Malaysia is a multicultural society where the traditional Austronesian and Aslian languages are spoken along with Chinese, North Indian, and Dravidian languages as well as English. The focus of linguistic research in Malaysia is on the national language, which is a standardized form of Malay, and there is in practice little attention for regional languages or non-standard Malay dialects. Malaysia is geographically divided into West Malaysia, or the Malay peninsula, and East Malaysia consisting of Sarawak and Sabah in North Borneo. These two parts represent different linguistic ecologies. The Austronesian languages in West Malaysia are Malay, which shows a considerable regional variety, and a very few other languages such as Duano’, which are very closely related to Malay and belong to the Malayic subgroup of (Western) Malayo Polynesian languages. Together with the Aslian languages, which have a much longer history in the peninsula and are Austro-Asiatic, 9 these Malayic languages belong to the traditional languages of the peninsula. In colonial times, the position of Malay was seriously encroached on by Chinese and English. While Bazaar Malay, its informal variant, was widely used as a lingua franca in the market and in inter-ethnic contact, it had little social prestige. However, since 1970 the Malaysian government has been actively promoting a standardized form of literary Malay in almost all public domains. Nevertheless, it has also recently re-introduced English as one of the medium languages in tertiary education and even for some science and mathematics subjects in secondary education, arguing that the use of good English is indispensable for the country if it wants to compete globally in science, technology, and other domains. 9 The Aslian languages are a diverse group of severely endangered and until very recently undescribed languages.

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The documentary linguistic projects in West Malaysia sponsored by DoBes, HRELP, and SIL all concern the Aslian languages. In East Malaysia, the role of Malay was historically less important, although that has changed in the last twenty-ﬁve years (see Collins 1990 for publications on Malay in East Malaysia). Here we ﬁnd a plethora of Austronesian languages, most of which are very different from Malay. They are spoken along with Chinese varieties and Malay vernaculars. Malay did not play a dominant role until after its establishment as an ofﬁcial language, which happened in Sarawak in 1973, and in Sabah in 1985. In Sarawak, Sarawak Malay is traditionally the home language of only one ﬁfth of the population, and before 1973 the primary lingua franca used to be Iban, the language of traditionally the largest ethnic group of the same name. In Sabah, Kadazan used to be the main lingua franca, and the role of Malay was even more marginal as there were hardly any mother tongue speakers of Malay. The establishment of Malay as an ofﬁcial language has changed all this. It has had a marginalizing effect on indigenous languages, and most notably on Iban and Kadazan, which have lost their hegemonic role. The Borneo Literary Bureau, which had been formed in Sarawak in 1958 to collect indigenous oral literature and produce reading materials in Iban and other indigenous languages, was taken over by the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (the ofﬁcial literacy bureau sponsored by the Malaysian government). This brought the publishing of books in indigenous languages basically to a standstill. 10 This resulted in a lack of written materials, which, together with the lack of trained teachers has had a negative effect on the teaching of Iban in primary schools and at lower secondary level (K. Smith 2003:54). The status of indigenous languages is further eroded by the Malaysian government’s emphasis on learning English in schools (K. Smith, e-mail communication). Florey (2005a) discusses languages in East Malaysia that have recently become extinct or are directly endangered. However, many indigenous languages continue to be community languages, and the most immediate threat is not just low speaker numbers. As Rensch et al. (2006:21) mention in relation to the Bidayuh language, intermarriage, urbanization, language contact, the prestige of other languages, the formal education system based on Malay, and even a lack of intergenerational transmission, are the main factors threatening their survival. For an overview of the literature on especially Sabahan languages, see King and King (1984), and (for more recent publications) Combrink et al. (2006). In 2004 and 2005 Peter Sercombe (Newcastle University, UK) conducted a documentation project sponsored by HRELP aiming at the compilation of a dictionary of Penan, a language with less than 10,000 speakers spoken by some of the Punans in interior Borneo. Penan speakers live along the Baram River in north Sarawak and in Apoh in Brunei. The dictionary will be trilingual (Penan, Malay, and English). The project also

10 According to Jimbun Tawai, Vice Chairman of the Sarawak Dayak Iban Association, in 1998 (K. Smith 2003:54).

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aims to enhance the literacy of the Penan in their own language (see Sercombe’s paper in this volume). Various other projects in Sarawak and Sabah are conducted by SIL or in association with that organization. In Sarawak, Rensch and his SIL team have been involved in the Bidayuh Language Development Project since 2000. Its goals are language revitalization, orthography development, an expansion of the literature, and facilitating the teaching of Bidayuh as a subject in schools. The team objectives include compiling a dictionary, describing the major Bidayuh varieties, training language teachers and establishing a language council (Rensch et al. 2006:23). The Bidayuh varieties in Sarawak consist of four dialect groups: Rara, Bau-Jagoi, Biatah, and Bukar-Sadong. 11 A grammar sketch of Bau-Jagoi was recently completed by one of the team members, Marilina Vega. The four dialect groups are endangered, and particularly Rara, because many of its speakers are shifting to Malay or Salako. However, this is to some extent a matter of perception. There are only three Rara villages in Sarawak, and the bulk of Rara speakers live across the border in (Indonesian) West Kalimantan, where the language is not under immediate threat. The language data collected by this team are archived by the Majlis Adat Istiadat (Native Customs Council) 12 in Kuching, a council involved in the documentation of indigenous languages and cultures. Juergen Burkhardt from Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main in Germany and a member of SIL is currently collecting linguistic data of Berawan varieties in the Lower Baram River area (Miri, Sarawak) as part of a comparative historical thesis including sketch grammars and phonologies. He is also working on Toolbox dictionaries of these varieties and of Kenyah. Jey Burkhardt is involved in the development of orthographies and literacy education among speakers of Berawan and also of Kelabit. Berawan varieties are endangered on account of their low numbers of speakers (less than a thousand each), grammar interference from Malay, and lexical loss in the speech of young speakers. Another SIL and native speaker of Kelabit, Lian David, is working on a Kelabit dictionary. In Sabah, Paul Kroeger is involved in the documentation of Kimaragang, a Dusunic language. Kimaragang is spoken in two dialects, Kimaragang proper, which is spoken in plain land, and a hills dialect called Sonsogon. Kimaragang proper is the most endangered due to the constant direct exposure of its speakers to Malay. Paul Kroeger has written extensively on the structure of this dialect (cf. Kroeger 2005) and is preparing a grammar. Jim Johansson, Janama, and Welin Jutaim are preparing an extensive Kimaragang-Malay-English dictionary. Other endangered Dusunic languages are Rungus and Tobilung. Native speakers of Rungus are preparing a new dictionary of their language. The recently founded TOBISA (Persatuan Tobilung Bersatu Sabah or

11 As far as Rensch et al.’s Bidayuhic subgroup is concerned, this is more a geographic conﬁguration of genetically related languages than a genetic subgroup, as Rensch et al. do not systematically attempt to include Bidayuhic (Land Dayak) language across the Sarawak-Indonesia border in their comparison. 12 See http://www.nativecustoms.sarawak.gov.my/.

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United Tobilung Association of Sabah) is actively involved in the documentation and maintenance of Tobilung, which includes the compilation a dictionary. Nelleke Johansson (née Goudzwaard) has published a reference grammar of Begak, an Ida’an dialect (Goudswaard 2005). A dictionary is in progress involving compilers who are native speakers. Richard and Kielo Brewis began work on a Timugon Murut—Malay dictionary which was later ﬁnished by Selipah Majlus (Kamus Murut 2004). Iranun (originally a Philippine language) has been losing many speakers to Malay and Bajau. Iranun people on Sabah’s west coast (and in the Lahad Datu area) began campaigning for the preservation of their language in 1995. With the help of Howard McKaughan, Karla Smith, and other members of SIL, an Iranun orthography was devised. Iranun speakers have been trained to write up literature in their own language and to use computers for the production of 67 booklets (K. Smith 2003:59–60). A dictionary is in progress, and Karla Smith is currently writing a PhD thesis on the Iranun language development project. Mark Miller has just ﬁnished a description of west coast Bajau, another non-native language of Sabah (Miller 2007). In the 1980s, SIL members together with the Kadazan Cultural Association started a campaign for the teaching of Kadazan (since 1995 called Kadazandusun) in schools. The ﬁrst classes were taught in 1994. In 1996, the Kadazandusun Language Foundation was created in order to preserve, develop, and promote Kadazandusun. It has developed reading materials and a school syllabus, organized workshops for the training of teachers and writers, initiated radio broadcasts and introduced Kadazandusun sections in newspapers. There are also plans for the compilation of dictionaries of regional languages (K. Smith 2003:56–7). Apart from the projects mentioned above, the Bidayuh dictionary by Nais (1988) and the Kayan dictionary by Southwell (1990) deserve mention as well as Robert Blust’s Long Kiput language materials (2003a) and Otto Steinmayer’s (1999) grammatical sketch of Iban. The latter is a happy compromise between informativeness and wider useability.

2.6 Indonesia The Republic of Indonesia is home to the largest concentration of Austronesian languages in the world. The language situation in the various islands and island groups in this country will therefore be discussed separately. By and large, the westernmost islands of Indonesia are linguistically more homogeneous than the islands in the east of the country. With some exceptions, linguistic research has traditionally been concentrated on languages in Java, Sumatra, and Bali. However, that situation has begun to change, and especially documentary linguistic projects are predominantly found in the Lesser Sunda Islands, the Moluccas and Sulawesi. For an overview of publications on Malay in Indonesia, see Collins (1990, 1995a, 1995b, 1996).

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2.6.1 Sumatra and surrounding islands The linguistic variation in Sumatra and surrounding islands is considerable, although probably not as rich as that of Borneo and Sulawesi. While Gordon (2005) counts 49 languages in Sumatra, the actual number may be less than half of that (cf. Florey 2005a), depending on how one counts and what language deﬁnition one applies. Seven clear independent language groups can be distinguished: (1) Acehnese (in the north), (2) Batakic languages (Central-North, including the remotely related Gayo in the north), (3) Malayic (West, East, and Southeast Sumatra, including Minangkabau in West Sumatra, Kerinci in Southwest Sumatra, and the Malayic varieties on Bangka and Belitung Islands), (4) Rejang (Southwest Sumatra), (5) Lampung (South Sumatra), (6) the Barrier Island languages spoken on the islands west of Sumatra (including Simalur, Nias, and Sichule), and (7) Enggano, a Malayo-Polynesian isolate. The languages of Sumatra proper have undergone (literary and mainstream) Malay and Javanese inﬂuence for centuries, often resulting in a loss of parts of their grammatical and lexical characteristics to these historically dominating languages. This is perhaps the most obvious in South Sumatra, where Malay has had an ongoing impact on the local Rejang and Lampung languages to such an extent that their status as independent languages only became clear beyond reasonable doubt since the 1970s when they were subjected to serious linguistic analysis (cf. Walker 1976 and McGinn 1982). But it is also clear in the Batak languages. Batak sources from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century exhibit much more ‘authentic’ forms of Batak usage than recent sources. And while the impact of Malay can be seen in every Sumatran language, Javanese inﬂuence has been very strong on Malay and Lampungic varieties of East and South Sumatra, with some sporadic lexical inﬂuence on other languages. There is currently no documentary linguistic programme focusing on this part of Indonesia. While the main linguistic varieties in each group have been studied at some point or other, there is much left to be done with regard to more regional varieties. Nevertheless, the last twenty or so years have seen the appearance of solid grammars of Lampung (Walker 1976), Rejang (McGinn 1982), Acehnese (Durie 1985), Karo Batak (Woollams 1996), Nias (L. Brown 2001), and Gayo (Eades 2005). Gérard Moussay published a grammar (1981) and dictionary (1995) of Minangkabau using French as a medium language. Fieldwork is currently being done on Riau Indonesian (David Gil, Max Planck Institute, Leipzig), Kerinci Malay (Gabriella Herzron, Delaware University), and Lampung (Karl Anderbeck, SIL Indonesia).

2.6.2 Java and Madura Linguistically, Java and Madura probably constitute the least variegated part of Indonesia, if not in relation to their size, then certainly in relation to their combined population. While about half of the Indonesian population lives on Java, the island

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represents only four distinct regional languages: Javanese, 13 Sundanese, Madurese, and Malay. The traditional inhabitants of Madura all speak Madurese. In spite of their large speech communities, the Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese languages are actually endangered in that some of their domains of usage are being taken over by Indonesian, and, to a lesser extent, in that they are not always passed on to the next generation. The decision of the Indonesian government in 1994 to introduce Javanese and other regional languages at primary and high schools has had mixed results. 14 Malay in Java is spoken in the form of Indonesian and of some local vernaculars, such as Betawi Malay and Java Malay (Adelaar and Prentice 1996). Indonesian is increasingly taught to children in urban settings, and, more particularly, if their parents are of a different language background. Jakarta Indonesian (a form of Indonesian with many adaptations from Betawi, the traditional Malay dialect of Jakarta), has become the most popular and prestigious colloquial form of Indonesian, not only in Jakarta, which is the administrative, cultural, and economic centre of Indonesia, but also in other urban centres among the educated youth. It has had much inﬂuence on colloquial registers of Indonesian elsewhere in the country. If anything, the language situation in Java clearly demonstrates that numbers of speakers alone are not necessarily an indicator of language vitality. Javanese with one of the largest speech communities in the world is under threat from Indonesian (in both its ofﬁcial and its colloquial varieties), and Indonesian is rapidly expanding at the expense of all other languages in the country. The languages of Java are among the best described and documented, but that does not mean that there is not much work to be done. Except for Malay, the three other languages each have a written tradition, which, in the case of Javanese, goes back to the eighth century AD. Whereas Javanese has been studied extensively for more than two centuries, much of the research has concentrated on the varieties of the court cities of Yogyakarta and Solo, which are considered the centres of Javanese culture, and on Old Javanese texts. Far too little is known about regional varieties, although the good news is that there are several research projects underway to ﬁll this gap: Arps’ research on the Osing dialect (at Leiden University), and two projects on dialect variety in general—one coordinated by Adelaar and Ewing (at the University of Melbourne, and sponsored by the Australian Research Council) and one coordinated by O’Connor (Max Planck Institute, Leipzig). There is furthermore a recent grammar of Cirebon Javanese by Ewing (2005a). A comprehensive overview of earlier studies of Javanese is the annotated bibliography by Uhlenbeck (1964), and recent work is included in the reference list in Ogloblin (2005). Both authors published extensively on modern and

13 The Osing dialect of Javanese (spoken in East Java) is sometimes considered as a language in its own right (cf. Gordon 2005). 14 Yacinta Kurniasih (personal communication) is ﬁnishing a PhD thesis about the implications of the government policy to introduce Javanese as a compulsory subject at schools from year 1 to 10 (Kurniasih to appear).

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Old Javanese. The latest description of modern Javanese is probably the grammar by Wedhawati et al. (2006). Sundanese is also relatively well documented. Recent reference works are the dictionaries by Hardjadibrata (2003) and Danadibrata (2007). The latter is a monumental work of ca. 40,000 entries. Madurese is originally the language of Madura Island but it is also widely spoken along Java’s east coast. Given that it is one of the major languages in the country, it has not been studied nearly as intensively as Javanese and Sundanese. For both Sundanese and Madurese, regional variety remains understudied. Colloquial Indonesian has recently been discussed by Ewing (2005b) and Sneddon (2006). There are many other (smaller) publications about Colloquial Indonesian, which is receiving ample attention from linguists, literati, and social scientists alike. While Indonesian (in general) is probably the fastest growing language in the country, as mentioned above, some Indonesians consider it as being under the threat of English. As to Betawi, this community dialect is under threat of disappearance, and Grijns’ (1991) dialect study was a timely effort to safeguard descriptive and textual data. 2.6.3 Kalimantan Kalimantan is the southern part of Borneo, making up two thirds of the island. Considering the enormous landmass it represents, there is no doubt that this is linguistically one of the most poorly documented parts of Indonesia. Especially the province of West Kalimantan was until very recently almost tabula rasa, except for some wordlists and a few ritual texts collected by Dutch missionaries. This situation has slowly begun to change. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Pusat Bahasa started publishing some descriptions of Ahe (a Kanayatn dialect) and various Bidayuhic and Ibanic languages, which are of a very preliminary nature. Since the 1990s, there have appeared a short grammatical outline of Embaloh (a Tamanic language, Adelaar 1995), a description of Bekatik (Bidayuhic; Sudarsono 2002), a grammar sketch, texts, and lexicon of Salako (a dialect of Kanayatn, a Malayic language; Adelaar 2005b), and a descriptive grammar of Mualang (Ibanic; Tjia 2007). Since 2001, Uri Tadmor has been conducting language documentation involving two subdialects of Ketapang Malay, the dialect of Ketapang City and that of Balai Berkuak (Ketapang Regency). Tadmor’s project, sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig), 15 aims to compile a computerized database to be used for descriptive and dialectological research, and to publish annotated texts. While the Ketapang Malay speech community in Balai Berkuak does not show tendencies for language shift, its language is in danger of losing its distinctive features through the koineizing inﬂuence of the Ketapang City subdialect and Indonesian. Other parts of Kalimantan are currently even worse off, although they have enjoyed more attention in the past. Already in colonial times, there was a large body of 15

For information, see http://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/jakarta/.

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descriptive data for Ngaju (West Barito, predominantly spoken in Central Kalimantan), and to a much lesser extent, for some other languages such as Maanyan (East Barito, Central, and South Kalimantan), and Busang (East Kalimantan; cf. Cense and Uhlenbeck 1958). More recently, the Pusat Bahasa issued various introductory descriptions and dictionaries. Other descriptive studies are the grammar sketches of Maanyan by Darmansyah H. Gudai (1985), and of Banjarese (Malayic) by Nirmala Sari (1984). One recent language documentation project was coordinated by Antonia Soriente in the Bulungan Regency in East Kalimantan. Sponsored by UNESCO’s ELP and the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, it aimed at the compilation of reading materials and dictionaries for three endangered languages, Oma Longh, Lebu’ Kulit, and Penan Benalui (Kenya-Kayan languages), and at an awareness campaign among the speakers of these languages and their training to actively participate in the documentation of their own language. A collection of short stories in Oma Longh and Lebu’ Kulit appeared recently (Soriente 2006). Another language documentation programme is being conducted by an SIL team coordinated by Lalani Woods. Based in Palangkaraya (Central Kalimantan), it used to collect mainly lexical data of Malayic and Barito varieties spoken in Central Kalimantan, but nowadays its focus has moved to developing literacy and literature in Delang (Malayic), Tewoyan (East Barito) and Siang (West Barito) communities. 2.6.4 Lesser Sunda Islands (West Nusa Tenggara and East Nusa Tenggara provinces) From Florey’s overview of language endangerment, it appears that in this part of Indonesia, the language situation is reasonably stable as far as languages with large speech communities are concerned, such as Bima, Manggarai, Dawan, although some of the minority languages in Flores and west Timor are endangered (Florey 2005a:53). Such stability certainly also concerns Balinese, which, allowing for sometimes considerable regional variety, is the unitary language of the island of Bali as well as the language of a sizeable minority on Lombok Island. As in the case of Javanese, Balinese has been the object of serious scholarship since colonial times, even if its documentation is far from complete and does not always meet modern linguistic criteria. Two recent studies by Adrian Clynes (1995) and I Wayan Arka (2003) have gone a long way to bring the state of description of Balinese up to date. Several documentary projects have been conducted in the Lesser Sunda Islands. From 1998 to 2003, Peter Austin led the Lombok and Sumbawa Research Project sponsored by the Australian Research Council and the University of Melbourne. It aimed at the documentation and structural, historical, and social study of Sasak and Sumbawa, which are spoken on Lombok Island and the western part of Sumbawa Island respectively. 16 16

See http://www.linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/research/projects/lombok/.

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From 2004 to 2006, I Wayan Arka collected linguistic and ethnographic data on the Rongga language on Flores with the aim to produce a grammar, basic dictionary, and teaching materials as part of a documentation project sponsored by HRELP. Rongga is a language with only 4,000 speakers who live squeezed between the two much larger speech communities of the Manggarai (with half a million speakers) and Ngada (66,000 speakers). The Rongga language and culture became marginalized through various historical circumstances in colonial times and during Suharto’s New Order regime (see Arka 2007b and in this volume). 17 Helong is currently the focus of a three year long documentation project by John Bowden. Helong is an endangered language spoken by a few thousand speakers in the region of Kupang, the administrative centre of West Timor. Apart from collecting Helong data, Bowden will also make a comparative study of language change in three Helong dialects and train staff and students at universities in Kupang in language documentation. 18 Another small documentation project led in the area in 2004 by Louise Baird involved Klon, Abui, and Teiwa, three non-Austronesian languages spoken on Alor and Pantar Islands. Klamer (1998) is a description of Kambera, a language spoken by almost half the population of Sumba Island. Mark Donohue is currently preparing a description (and ultimately also a dictionary) of Palu’e (spoken on Palu’e island off the northwest coast of Flores). 2.6.5 Sulawesi According to Ethnologue (Gordon 2005), there are 114 languages spoken in Sulawesi. Florey (2005a) gives an overview of endangered languages on this island, which is known for its linguistic diversity, although this diversity is more of a typological than a genetic nature. Mead has gone a long way to show that all central and southeastern Sulawesi languages belong to one genetic subgroup (Mead 2003; cf. also van den Berg 1996a). Although seriously understudied in the past, in recent years Sulawesi has enjoyed the attention of many linguists culminating in a good number of major works. Noorduyn (1991) provides a bibliography of earlier linguistic publications. Ratahan is spoken in the Minahasa (northern tip of Sulawesi) and is on the verge of extinction. Anthony Jukes coordinated the Documentation of Ratahan Project (2005– 2007) in co-operation with Drs Tartius Timpai. The project is sponsored by HRELP and aims at the documentation of Ratahan, and at cooperation with members of the Ratahan speech community to safeguard the survival of their language. 19 Jukes has also produced a grammar of Makassarese (Jukes 2007). Nikolaus Himmelmann and team (Claudia Leto, Jan Wohlgemut, and Jani KuhntSaptodewo) have been working since 2005 on a three-year project ‘Capacity building 17 18 19

See also http://rspas.anu.edu.au/linguistics/projects/iwa/Web-pages/RonggaProject. See www.hrelp.org/grants/projects/index.php?projid=115. See http://www.hrelp.org/grants/projects/index.php?lang=91.

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on a local and national level: Documenting Totoli’. Totoli (to the west of the Ratahan area) is the language of some 5,000 speakers in Tolitoli District, Central Sulawesi. The project is sponsored by DoBes and carried out in cooperation with Hasan Basri from the Universitas Tadulako in Palu. The projects seeks (1) to document Totoli everyday language and oral literature, including the lelegesan (a traditional singing competition), and (2) to organize workshops in Indonesia for training in language documentation (see Florey and Himmelmann, this volume). Already in 2001, Himmelmann published his Sourcebook on Tomini-Tolitoli languages, which contains a wealth of lexical material as well as important phonological and morphological information on this poorly documented subgroup in northern Central Sulawesi. This sourcebook is also generally meant as a model for efﬁcient preliminary research on poorly described languages (Himmelmann 2001; cf. also Himmelmann, this volume). Two other important recent reference works for Sulawesi are Mark Donohue’s grammar of Tukang Besi (Donohue 1999) and Erik Zobel’s grammar sketch of Buol (Zobel 2005). SIL teams have been very active in Sulawesi. In Central Sulawesi, Phil and Beckie Quick worked together with a team of native speakers in the Pendau Language Project from 1989 to 2006. That project aims at the conservation and revitalization of the Pendau (or Umalasa) language, spoken by some 4,500 people north of Palu town. They have produced an orthography, grammar, lexicon, literature collection and recordings of music and liturgy. Phil Quick also wrote a detailed description of Pendau (Quick 2008). Susan Shore is compiling dictionaries of ﬁve Central Sulawesi languages: Napu, Bada, Behoa, Rampi, and Sedoa. She is also preparing grammars for local usage, and she works together with native speakers training them to write and edit stories in these languages. In western Central Sulawesi, Michael Martens is compiling a trilingual dictionary of Uma (Uma–English–Indonesian). Martens has built a lexical database of Kaili-Pamona and Badaic languages as well as Rampi, to be used for historical purposes. He published various works on Uma morphosyntax, most of which can be found in Dardjowidjojo (1987) and Steinhauer (1988). Laua, Martens, and Martens (2001) is a large collection of Uma folktales and Uma accounts of historical and cultural topics. Muna has been well described by René van den Berg, who wrote a Muna grammar (van den Berg 1989), a Muna–English dictionary (van den Berg 1996b), and a Muna– Indonesian dictionary (van den Berg 2001). Van den Berg is currently preparing a South Muna dictionary in collaboration with Lukas Atakasi. He is also working on a grammar sketch and wordlist of Busoa (South Buton) and, with Bob and Marilyn Busenitz, on a grammar of Balantak in East Sulawesi. Bob and Marylin Busenitz also contributed to a Balantak trilingual dictionary edited by Daniel Bradbury (Bradbury ed. 2000). Donna Evans has published a trilingual dictionary of Ledo (a Kaili language spoken in the Palu River valley), which also contains a Ledo sketch grammar (Evans 2003). David Mead made an overview of Bungku-Tolaki languages (Mead 1999). He

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is currently working on grammars and dictionaries of two members of this subgroup, Kulisusu and Mori Bawah, and has published a grammar sketch of Mori (Mead 2005). Finally, SIL members are preparing grammars and dictionaries for Moronene (David Andersen), Tolaki (Scott Youngman), and Seko Padang (Tom and Kathy Laskowske). Ruben Stoel (2005) produced a grammatical description of Manado Malay, which is the local Malay variant spoken in Manado and elsewhere in North Sulawesi, and it is historically an offshoot of Ternate Malay. 2.6.6 Moluccas Ethnologue (Gordon 2005) lists 132 Austronesian languages for the Moluccas. Florey (2005c) writes that these islands have the highest level of language endangerment in Indonesia. Six languages are known to have become extinct in recent times, and ten are moribund, especially on Seram Island, while nine other languages are seriously endangered. Reasons for this situation are contacts with non-indigenous peoples, colonization, trade, conversions to Christianity and Islam, and, recently, interethnic violence leading to loss of many lives and displacement of entire villages. Florey also notes the poor state of description for Moluccan languages. She lists nine languages with some form of grammatical description, to wit Alune (Florey 2001b, 2005b, in press), Nuaulu (Bolton 1990), Larike (Laidig and Laidig 1991a, 1991b), Buru (C. Grimes 1991), Taba (Bowden 2001), west Tarangan (Nivens 2002), Selaru (Coward 1990), Letinese (van Engelenhoven 2004) and Tugun (Hilton 1991). An Asilulu— English dictionary was published by James Collins (2003a). The Maluku Project (with Margaret Florey, Michael Ewing, Betty Litamahuputty, and Simon Musgrave) ran from 2003 to 2006 and was sponsored by HRELP and the Australian Research Council. 20 Florey, the project leader, documented the language of the Amahei, Makariki, Rutah, and Soahuku villages on Seram (Florey 2005b, in press). Ewing (2005c, in press) provided documentation of Allang, spoken in Allang, Larike, and Wakasihu villages on Ambon Island, and Musgrave worked on the documentation of the language spoken in the Tenga-Tenga, Tial, Tulehu, Liang, and Waai villages on Ambon (2005, forthcoming). The project involved ﬁeldwork in the Moluccas as well as in the Moluccan diaspora in the Netherlands (see Netherlands) and included the training of local linguists and Community Language Workers in the Moluccas and the Netherlands. Malay has long played an important role in the Moluccas, leading to the emergence of some typically Moluccan Malay varieties. Don van Minde published a reference grammar of Ambonese Malay (van Minde 1997). 2.6.7 West Papua According to Ethnologue (Gordon 2005), only ﬁfty-six of the 271 languages in this part of Indonesia are Austronesian. This region is beginning to receive more attention with 20

http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/linguistics/maluku/project.php.

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reference works appearing and some projects underway or in preparation. Van den Heuvel recently ﬁnished a reference grammar of Biak in the Bird’s Head (van den Heuvel 2006). Descriptive information on Raja Ampat languages is found in Remijsen (2001). Yusuf Sawaki from the University Negeri Papua is commencing documentation work on Waropen. David Price (SIL) has built a large lexical database of Ambai (Yapen). Takashi Matsumura is compiling a lexicon of Irarutu, a language from the Bomberai peninsula, on which René van den Berg has recently also done research. There are furthermore unpublished SIL data on various languages including Wandamen and Mor (René van den Berg p.c.).

2.7 Brunei As noted in Florey (2005a), Martin (1996), and elsewhere, the main language in this sultanate is Brunei Malay, a vigorous language which overshadows the existence of the ﬁve other languages as well as the Kadayan Malay dialect spoken here. Some of these languages (Punan, Belait) are endangered. The Universiti Brunei Darussalam is funding two documentation projects running from May 2007 to May 2009. The Tutong Language Documentation Project aims at the compilation of digital recordings of Tutong oral texts with glosses and transcriptions in Malay and English, and possibly at the compilation of a dictionary and a description. Tutong is spoken in Tutong district, and the project members consist of three native speakers (Hajee Ramlee Tunggal, Dr Noor Azam OKMB Hajee Othman, Dr Hajee Ramlee Tingkong), and Adrian Clynes (all from Universiti Brunei Darussalam). The Belait Language and Oral History Documentation Project involves the Metting dialect in the Kiudang and Mungkom villages (Tutong district). Participants are Adrian Clynes and Hajah Asiyah, a native speaker of Metting Belait. The project aims at the compilation of digital recordings with Malay and English glosses and transcriptions of oral texts dealing with the history of the village and its traditions and literature. Here again, the long-term aims are a description and the compilation of a dictionary.

2.8 Taiwan The language situation in Taiwan is in many ways exceptional within the context of Austronesian languages and their vitality. There are 430,000 indigenous Taiwanese (making up 1.9 per cent of the total population), and there are about twenty-four Austronesian languages, some of which are extinct. All these languages are Formosan except for Yami (spoken on Orchid Island), which is a Malayo-Polynesian language and is more closely related to Philippine languages. While some of these languages have reasonably large speech communities (especially Amis, Atayal, Paiwan, and Seediq (Truku) with respectively 158,000, 76,000, 79,000, and more than 20,000 speakers), all are endangered or even extinct, as in the case of Siraya, Papora, Basay,

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Ketagalan, Kulun, Taokas, and Hoanya. 21 At least four languages are on the verge of extinction (Pazih, Thao, Saaroa, and Kavalan), and the other languages are often not transmitted adequately from one generation to the next. From the perspective of language vitality the situation here is generally more alarming than elsewhere in the Austronesian world. On the other hand, there are currently few countries with Austronesian speakers showing the same measure of involvement in salvaging and documenting languages as Taiwan. There is currently a nationwide attention for the Formosan cultural heritage. Ethnographic and linguistic research is ﬂourishing and there is an education program since 2001 for the teaching of Formosan languages in elementary schools. It has not always been like this, and the current positive attitude cannot be disconnected from the present political and ideological climate, in which Formosan identity plays an increasingly important role in the deﬁnition of Taiwanese nationhood. Formosan languages did enjoy the special attention of historical linguists interested in Proto Austronesian since 1965, when Isidore Dyen (1965) pointed out their special genetic position within the Austronesian language family. However, very little research had been done until the 1970s, when Paul Jen-kuei Li and Shigeru Tsuchida took upon them the at ﬁrst rather lonely task of describing Formosan languages (and Yami) and rescuing data from moribund languages wherever they could. It is only in recent times that they obtained support from other linguists and extensive research is being done on the various Formosan languages that are still spoken. See Tsuchida (2000a) for an overview of Japanese contributions to Formosan linguistics, Li (2000) and Zeitoun (2007a) for an overview of other contributions to the ﬁeld, and Li (2004) for a collection of Paul Li’s shorter publications. More recent major publications are a Thao dictionary (Blust 2003b), Yami texts, reference grammar and dictionary (Rau and Dong 2006), a Kavalan dictionary (Li and Tsuchida 2006), Pazih texts and songs (Li and Tsuchida 2002), a Pazih dictionary (Li and Tsuchida 2001), and sketch grammars of Tsou (Zeitoun 2005) and Seediq (Tsukida 2005). A description of Nanwang Puyuma by Stacy Fang-ching Teng has recently appeared (Teng 2009). There is a collection of Nanwang Puyuma ritual texts by Josiane Cauqelin. Elizabeth Zeitoun has written a grammar of Mantauran Rukai (Zeitoun 2007b) and published annotated Mantauran Rukai narratives together with Hui-chuan Lin (Zeitoun and Lin 2003). Two Bunun descriptions are in production—by Motoyasu Nojima on Isbukun Bunun, and by Rik de Busser on Takivatan Bunun. The Taiwanese linguistic scene is also exceptional in that there are four digital language archives in the country (a situation which no doubt requires some rationalization): the Formosan Language Archive at the Academia Sinica (formosan.sinica.edu.tw), the NTU Corpus of Formosan Languages at the National Taiwanese University (corpus.linguistics.ntu.edu.tw), the Yami Archive at Providence University, and a corpus which has been produced by Josef Szakos.

21

Figures are from the Council of Indigenous Peoples,/http://www.apc.gov.tw/.

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The following projects explicitly deal with the documentation of Austronesian languages in Taiwan. At the Academia Sinica, Elizabeth Zeitoun and her colleagues have been building corpora of annotated texts, bibliographic references, and a geographic information system for eleven Formosan languages. These are stored in the Formosan Language Archive, the ﬁrst digital language archive to be established in Taiwan. The data are translated into Chinese and English and are available for research as well as for pedagogical purposes. Victoria Rau and her team at Providence University coordinated a project called ‘Digital Archiving Yami Language Documentation’ (yamiproject.cs.pu.edu.tw). Originally started with a grant from HRELP in 2005–7, its goals were to document the Yami language, to prepare digital archive materials and to facilitate the preservation and dissemination of these materials (which constitute of twenty narratives, a grammar, a trilingual dictionary and multimedia pedagogical materials). It also aimed to standardize the procedures of digital archiving, to make Yami data available as learning materials, and to develop e-learning (see Rau and Yang in this volume, Rau and Yang 2007, Rau et al. 2007). Over the last twenty years, Josef Szakos (Dong Hua University, Hualian) has been collecting recordings of all genres of Tsou, Saaroa, and Kanakanavu. These are being annotated and translated and will be made publicly available. Fuhui Hsieh and Shuanfan Huang at the National Taiwan University are involved in a project for the documentation of Kavalan, Atayal, Tsou, Seediq, and Saisiyat (Hsieh and Huang 2007). Paula Radetzky obtained support from DEL for the description and documentation of Saaroa (which has only ﬁve speakers left) and Kavalan. A somewhat unorthodox project in the context of this volume is the analysis of Siraya. This is one of the languages documented by missionaries in the seventeenth century, when west Taiwan was occupied by the Dutch (1627–61). Paul Jen-kuei Li has (among others) worked intensively on the interpretation of Siraya land contracts that appeared after this occupation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Li 2002; cf. also various other publications in Li 2004). Shigeru Tsuchida (1996, 2000b) wrote on Siraya grammar, and Tsuchida and Yamada (1991) pointed to the existence of Siraya dialect variation. The present author has been working on the analysis of seventeenthcentury liturgical texts in Siraya, aiming at the publication of a grammar, a lexicon, and a glossed version of the Gospel of St Matthew (cf. Adelaar 1997, 1999, 2000, 2004, 2006). Although this language became extinct at the beginning of the twentieth century, if not earlier, in the Tainan region in Taiwan’s southwest there is still an indigenous community that identiﬁes as the descendants of Siraya speakers and takes a lively interest in the language (Adelaar 2007:33–4).

2.9 Philippines Information about language documentation in the Philippines has not been easy to obtain, and there are probably many more activities deployed in this country than

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appear in the present summary overview. Local organizations that are involved in language documentation are the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP), the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF, the Commission on the Filipino Language), and various local branches of SIL. 22 Ethnologue (Gordon 2005) estimates the number of languages in the Philippines at 175, spoken by a population of 86 million. Three major documentation efforts have been conducted. With support from HRELP (2006–7), Charles Macdonald is preparing a Palawan-Tagalog-English lexicon, which will eventually develop into a fully-ﬂedged dictionary. 23 In 2003, the ELP at the UNESCO launched a project for the preservation of the Hudhud, an old oral tradition of the Ifugao (Luzon, Philippines), with the ﬁnancial support of the Japanese government. 24 SIL has been active in the revitalization of Ibatan on Babuyan Claro Island in the northern Philippines since 1978. At that time, there were only 500 Ibatan speakers, and many were shifting to Ilokano. Rundell and Judi Maree and some local native speakers began a concerted effort to revive Ibatan by providing reading materials and a newspaper, initiating a writers’ club and a cooperative, and using the language in every context. The team also successfully campaigned for better infrastructure (in the form of a high school and clinic) and for granting the Ibatans a Certiﬁcate of Ancestral Domain Title to their traditional land. Nowadays there are more than 1200 Ibatans, and they are ofﬁcially recognized as a distinct tribe of the Philippines. There are now numerous publications in their language, which has regained status, is used in high school, and is even learned by non-Ibatans (Quakenbush 2007). The KWF (under directorship of Ricardo Nolasco) is also involved in documentation and archiving. It is planning a line map of Philippine languages, with voice, written samples and ethnographic notes. It is also co-sponsoring (with De la Salle University) a lecture workshop on Building the Philippine Corpus. Laura Robinson (University of Hawai’i) is documenting Dupaningan Agta, a ‘Negrito’ language in Cagayan province (Luzon). The ‘Negritos’ are a racially distinct minority of about 31,000 people still representing an older pre-Austronesian population (see Headland in this volume). Negrito languages are typologically and lexically somewhat different from other Philippine languages, although they still have a lot in common with them and are Malayo-Polynesian. All Negrito languages are endangered: some (Dicamay Agta, Tayabas Ayta, Katabaga) have recently become extinct, and others are about to become extinct or have very few speakers (Ata, Sorsogon Ayta, Isarog Agta, Alabat Island Agta, Camarines Norte Agta, Mt Iraya Agta, Arta, northern Alta, southern Alta, Batek, Inati). Some other

22 Their respective websites are (NCIP:) www.ncip.gov.ph, (KWF:) www.wika.pbwiki.com, and (SIL:) www.sil.org/asia/philippines). However, these websites are in need of further updating. 23 hrelp.org/grants/projects/index.php?projid=100. 24 http://www.unesco.org/culture/ICH/index.php?cp=PH.

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Philippine languages (Sinauna Tagalog 25 and Molbog) are also endangered (Florey 2005a:56–7). 26 Other projects are primarily descriptive. Hsiu-chuan Liao (Tsing Tao University, Taiwan) is analysing the structure of Ilongot (also called Bukalot), Jason Lobel (Hawai’i) is making a dialectological study of the Bisayan languages, and Sheila Zamar (Hawai’i) is currently writing about Sorsoganon (a Bisayan language). Finally, important descriptive work on Ilocano and Tagalog has been done by Carl Rubino, including an Ilocano grammar, phrasebook, and dictionary (Rubino 1997, 1998, 2000; cf. also http://iloko.tripod.com/).

2.10 East Timor East Timor has about 800,000 citizens (Hajek 2006b:121). As Hajek indicates, there are approximately twenty languages spoken in East Timor (2006:122). Four of these languages (Makasae, Bunak, Fataluku, and Makalero) are not Austronesian. Hajek (2002) gives an account of how under Indonesian rule (1976–99) the local Timorese languages were threatened in a number of ways. Before the Indonesian invasion, the indigenous languages, with the limited exception of Tetum, were very much left to their own devices. Portuguese was the language of colonial administration and education. A creolized form of Tetum was the interethnic lingua franca, except in the Fataluku-speaking area in the eastern tip of the island and in the Oe-Cussé enclave to the west. The Indonesian administration tried to replace Portuguese (and Chinese in the Chinese community) with Indonesian, an endeavour in which it largely succeeded. The only domains where it was unsuccessful were the anti-Indonesian resistance and the Catholic Church. The resistance movement Fretilin kept on using Portuguese to the extent that it became the language of resistance. In the RC Church the Indonesian administration did manage to ban the use of Portuguese for liturgical purposes, but it was replaced by Tetum instead of Indonesian. The other local languages were severely threatened by a huge inﬂux of Indonesian migrants into East Timor and the conduct of the Indonesian army, which caused massive population displacement and the loss of more than 200,000 lives. After the Indonesian army withdrew from East Timor in 1999, Portuguese was re-introduced and promoted as the ofﬁcial language together with Tetum. Indonesian was abolished as an ofﬁcial language, as it did not enjoy much popularity as the language of the former occupier. Nevertheless, it remains widely understood among East Timorese, especially young people, who used it before 1999. Replacing it with Portuguese and Tetum is not without its problems from the point of view of education and efﬁciency of communication. 25

A non-Negrito language, although its speakers are Negritos. Important contributions to the study of Negrito languages over the years have been made by Laurie Reid (cf. Florey 2005a:56–7). 26

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Hajek and Bowden (this volume) note a continued increase in the vitality of Tetum, the main local lingua franca. This vitality comes at the expense of regional languages and is partly due to the growing geographical and social mobility of the East Timorese since the Indonesians withdrew from their country in 1999. However, the other indigenous languages are also surprisingly resilient considering East Timor’s tragic history. The only language which is clearly at risk is Maku’a, which has very few speakers left as a result of language shift towards the non-Austronesian language Fataluku (Hajek 2006b:122). In 2004–6, a project for the collection and initial analysis of textual material of Waima’a was sponsored by DoBes and coordinated by Nikolaus Himmelmann, John Hajek, and John Bowden. Waima’a is an endangered Austronesian language, which is spoken in small pockets and is being overshadowed by Tetum and two neighbouring languages, Galoli and, especially, Makasae. The project also provides a sketch grammar, a glossary for local usage, and literacy materials. 27 In 2003, van Engelenhoven collected and edited Maku’a data in Portugal and East Timor as part of a pilot project with support from HRELP. 28 Geoffrey Hull published Tetum–English (2004a) and English–Tetum dictionaries (2004b) and a reference grammar together with Lance Eccles (Hull and Eccles 2004). As part of the Sebastião Aparício da Silva Project, he has made grammar proﬁles of all East Timorese languages, which are accessible through the website of the Instituto Nacional de Linguística (http://www.asianlang.mq.edu.au/INL/).

2.11 Vanuatu With their 114 languages, the islands of Vanuatu in the Paciﬁc constitute the linguistically most diverse part of the Austronesian world relative to their landmass. They are the arena of many language documentation activities and six projects have been funded by HRELP. Neverver (Malakula) is being documented by Julie Barbour (this volume). Her project (2004–7) aims at a detailed grammatical description and the presentation of a selection of discourse features of oral texts. It will also provide literacy materials (trilingual dictionary, school wordlist, text collections) as well as editorial help with the publication of a hymn book written by native speakers. Seke (Ske) on Pentecost Island is the focus of Kay Johnson’s documentation project (2007–9), which includes the collection of texts concerning oral history, ceremonial speech and conversation as well as the description of spatial/temporal expressions, a trilingual dictionary, ethnobotanical information, a sketch grammar, and a sociolinguistic survey. Valérie Guérin obtained a grant (2007–9) for the collection of digitalized texts and the production of a grammar and lexicon of Mafea. She also plans to convert Mafea digital information into literacy material (story books etc.) for children and adults. 27 28

http://rspas.anu.edu.au/linguistics/projects/Waimaha/eng/index.html. http://www.hrelp.org/grants/projects/index.php?projid=23.

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Three varieties of Qatareu (spoken in Lakona Bay, Gaua Island) were documented by Hans Schmidts’ project (2004–6). Schmidt aimed at a linguistic description, a trilingual (Qatareu-Bislama-English) dictionary, and the collection of traditional stories to be used as reading material for native speakers. Peter Budd completed a PhD thesis on Bierebo (Epi Island), where, together with the local community, he is preparing an annotated corpus of audio and video data (2005–7). Budd is also producing an orthography, basic literacy materials for primary education, a Bierebo-Bislama-English dictionary, and a sketch grammar. Catriona Malau (née Hyslop) undertook a project from 2004–6 to document Vurës, which is spoken on Vanua Lava (Banks Islands) in northern Vanuatu. The project outcomes included a grammar and a Vurës–Bislama–English dictionary as well as the production of reading materials to enhance literacy among Vurës speakers. Another project conducted by Ulrike Mosel (Kiel University) and Catriona Malau is sponsored by DoBes (2006–9). It is partly an extension of Malau’s HRELP project. It aims at the documentation of Vurës and Vera’a, the two remaining languages on Vanua Lava, although primary focus is on Vera’a, which is the most endangered of the two and has not been documented at all. Anticipated outcomes are a collection of annotated audio and video recordings for both languages, and a lexical database. Between 2000 and 2003, the ELP started a language revitalization project in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji, creating basic documentation and language materials to facilitate the use of various community languages. With the support of the Japanese government, this UNESCO project was prolonged in 2006 and is now focusing on 12 languages in the area under the coordination of Hannah Vari-Bogiri (this volume) at the University of the South Paciﬁc. 29 After the unexpected death in 2005 of one of the pioneers of Vanuatu linguistics, Terry Crowley, some of his colleagues made a concerted effort to edit and publish a number of unﬁnished studies of languages from Malakula that he had left behind. So far, four monographs (on Nese, Naman, Tape, and Avava) have appeared, which were edited by John Lynch (Crowley 2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2006d). Alexandre François has been working on seventeen languages in Vanuatu. He has written extensively on the structure of Mwotlap (François 2001, 2003) and is preparing a Mwotlap dictionary (François to appear). He has also written a grammar of Araki (2002). Ross Clark (1998) published a dictionary of Mele, a Polynesian outlier in Vanuatu. He is currently doing ﬁeldwork on Santo (northwest Vanuatu). A reference grammar of South Efate resulted from Nick Thieberger’s documentation of that language (Thieberger 2006), and Ying Shing Anthony Chung has produced a descriptive grammar of Merei (2006). Cindy Schneider is ﬁnishing an Abma (Apma)–English dictionary and an Abma–English story book (Abma is spoken on Pentecost Island). Her PhD thesis, a description of Abma, has been accepted for publication by Paciﬁc 29

http://www.unesco.org/culture/heritage/intangible/endangeredlanguages/index.shtml.

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Linguistics in Canberra. The same publisher recently printed Jill Musgrave’s grammar of Neve’ei (Malakula Island) ( J. Musgrave 2007). SIL has recently been involved in the documentation of the following languages: on Epi Island: Baki, Lewo, and Lamen; on Ambrym: Southeast Ambrym; on Malakula: Maskelynes and Uripiv; on Santo: Tangoa and Merei; and on Tanna: North Tanna, Southwest Tanna, and Kwamera. SIL has also been involved in training educators from a number of Vanuatu languages such as the languages of Pentecost (Saa and dialects, Haa, and Ef, Apma, Hano and Ske), Ambae, Epi, Paama, North Ambrym, Uripiv, Tangoa, Hog Harbor, Merei, North Tanna, South Efate, Namakura, and Nguna. This training is in line with the Department of Education’s desire to teach Class 1 students in their vernacular languages. 30 The Paciﬁc Languages Unit at the University of the South Paciﬁc is involved, with Robert Early working on Baki, Lewo, and Lamen (on Epi Island), and Hannah VariBogiri preparing a PhD thesis on the grammar of Raga. Vari-Bogiri is also cooperating with David Walsh and Richard Leona in the compilation of a Raga dictionary, and she is working on Araki (see Chapter 9 in this volume). Finally, the Vanuatu Cultural Centre (with Joel Simo as a permanent staff member) is very active in language matters. It has a large network of ﬁeldworkers conducting language documentation and maintenance activities on a more informal but highly contextualized basis.

2.12 Austronesian Languages in the Diaspora Several countries have sizeable Austronesian speaking communities as a result of recent migrations. In the Sri Lanka, Comoros, Netherlands, and Surinam, these communities have a very recent history 31 . In the Netherlands, Malay and Moluccan languages are receiving a fair amount of attention due to the presence of a developed linguistic infrastructure and an engaged native speaker community. Sri Lanka Malay is enjoying the attention of many linguists, among others because of its great typological interest (having developed a typical SOV morphosyntax). 2.12.1 Malay in Sri Lanka There are some 50,000 Muslims of Malay descent in Sri Lanka. They are the descendants of soldiers, exiles and slaves brought along from Indonesia and Malaysia by the Dutch East India Company in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and of military brought in from Malaysia by the British in the nineteenth century (Hussainmiya 1991). Many of these people do not speak Malay any more, especially members of the metropolitan middle class, who prefer to speak English with the hope that it will 30

The information about SIL activities in Vanuatu is from Jim Stahl (p.c.). Elsewhere (Hainan [PR China], Cambodia, Thailand), migrant communities have a much longer history. 31

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provide their children with a better career future. However, there is renewed interest in their own language and culture, especially since civil war broke out in Sri Lanka (possibly out of concern not to be associated with any of the warring fractions). Sri Lanka Malay is spoken in Colombo, Kandy, and south of Colombo in coastal places such as Galle, Hambantota, and Kirinda. The devastating tsunami just after Christmas 2004 seriously affected several coastal communities and caused a high death toll among Malays. It is only in the last 22 years that Sri Lanka Malay has received linguistic attention, with documentary contributions from Hussainmiya (1987), Bichsel (1989), Adelaar (1991), and Saldin (1996). There are possibly as many as four different Sri Lanka Malay dialects (including the dialects of Colombo, Kandy, Hambantota, and South Kirinda). The description and documentation of these dialects are the objectives of a four-year DoBes-sponsored project (2005–8) led by Umberto Ansaldo and Lisa Lim at the University of Amsterdam. Within this project, B. D. K. Saldin recently compiled a dictionary, and Sebastian Nordhoff is ﬁnishing a grammar based on the Kandy dialect in Sri Lanka’s central highlands. Peter Slomanson is preparing a grammar based on the Colombo dialect and the Kirinda dialect spoken in the southeast. For an overview of publications on Malay in Sri Lanka, see Collins (1995b). 2.12.2 Malagasy in the Comoros In 1987 there were 19,000 Malagasy speakers on the island of Mayotte in the Comoros (Gueunier 1988:143), using two dialects, Kibushi Kimaore and Kiantalaotsy. Their ancestors had been brought in to the Comoros in the nineteenth century as a result of the slave trade in East Africa. Kibushi Kimaore is closely related to the North Sakalava, North Betsimisaraka, and Tsimihety dialects in the north. Kiantalaotsy is an offshoot of the Antalaotra dialect in West Madagascar. The mutual inﬂuence of these dialects, which have developed in isolation from other Malagasy speakers, has caused them to converge a great deal (Gueunier 1988:163). There is a dictionary of Comorian Malagasy from Gueunier (1986) and an unpublished Comorian Malagasy sketch grammar by the same author. 2.12.3 Austronesian languages in the Netherlands Melayu Sini. After Indonesia became independent and the Dutch colonial army was about to be dissolved, in 1950 certain forces in the South Moluccas tried in vain to break away and establish their own independent republic. In the politically volatile situation that followed, there was fear for reprisals against Moluccan soldiers who had served in the Dutch colonial army and still lived with their families in barracks on the island of Java. As a consequence, in 1951 more than 12,500 Moluccans were brought to the Netherlands (the present number of Moluccans in the Netherlands is about 50,000). The community was linguistically not homogenous but had a common and unifying

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language. This was commonly referred to as ‘Moluccan Malay’, but was in fact Tangsi Malay (‘Barracks Malay’), a form of low Malay with elements of Ambon Malay, Java Malay, and Riau Malay used in the Dutch colonial army (Tahitu 1993:278–9). As the Moluccans initially remained rather segregated from Dutch mainstream society, they were able to preserve the Malay language reasonably well for some time, although there was always the inevitable interference from Dutch. Nowadays, however, the language is endangered in two ways. First, Moluccans have become more integrated in mainstream society and end up shifting to Dutch, and second, there is much Dutch inﬂuence and a high occurrence of Dutch code-switching in the Malay of especially young Moluccans. To distinguish this language from real Moluccan Malay, it is nowadays often called Melaju Sini (‘the Malay from here’), a term which also acknowledges the fact that it has undergone much inﬂuence from Dutch and that it is not a direct continuation of Moluccan Malay. A description of this language appeared in 1989 (Tahitu 1989). Traditional Moluccan languages. These languages, or the so-called bahasa tanah (‘regional [Moluccan] languages’), are not widely known in the Dutch Moluccan community. As time went by younger Moluccans tended to perceive their ancestral languages as one single bahasa tanah originating from Nunusaku, a mountain on Seram Island believed to be the mythical origin of the Moluccan peoples. Nevertheless, some ﬁrst generation members of the community never gave up these regional languages as their mother tongue. Systematic investigation by Florey and van Engelenhoven has shown that there are in fact at least twelve Moluccan languages that survived the migration and some are still spoken in the Netherlands today (cf. Florey and van Engelenhoven 2001). Languages from the central Moluccan islands include Allang, Amahai, Haruku, and Tulehu (with unconﬁrmed reports of speakers of Alune, Buru, Hila, Hitu, and Kamarian). From the southeast Moluccan islands they include Ewaw and Fordate (and, unconﬁrmed, Dobo, Selaru, Sewasa, and Yamdena). From the southwest Moluccan islands, there are Kotalama, central Marsela, Meher, Nila, Oirata, Serua, and Wetan, (and, unconﬁrmed, Imroing and Tela) (Florey 2002:263). In Indonesia, many of these languages are moribund. Florey argues that the fact that they are spoken in the Netherlands is propitious as the opportunities for language maintenance activities are better in that country. This is due to the extra ﬁnancial and infrastructural resources and the existence of a Moluccan community in the Netherlands, which is active and highly motivated to preserve its own cultural and linguistic heritage. The Maluku Project is also involved in documentary linguistic training of local language activists. One southwest Moluccan language in the Netherlands, for which the existence of speakers remained unconﬁrmed in Florey (2002), was later found to have one speaker. This is Southeast Babar, and a phonological sketch is being prepared by Steinhauer (Steinhauer 2009). Surinam Javanese. Since about 1976 there has been a Surinamese Javanese community in the Netherlands. In 2000 it had 22,000 members living throughout

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the country. Its members have started a cultural foundation, the Rukun Budi Utama, which is running, among others, a radio station called Radio Budi Utama (http://RBU.Javanen.nl/content/view/142/71/, 9 March 2000). Perukunan Budi Sejati, another sociocultural organization (in Utrecht) is organizing and supervising a Javanese course with textbooks for beginners and advanced learners. 32 2.12.4 Javanese in Surinam The small Republic of Surinam in South America has a sizeable Javanese community living in Crommewijne District, and, to a less extent, along the Surinam coast. Its members came as contract workers to work in plantations. They were brought in from Indonesia by the Dutch between 1890 and 1939, when both countries were under Dutch rule. In 1971 the community had grown to 58,900 members, some of whom left for the Netherlands when Surinam became independent in 1976 (see 2.12.3). In 1994, the number was at 65,000. 33 Apart from Surinam and the Netherlands, Javanese speaking communities are also surviving in Malaysia and New Caledonia). The Javanese from Surinam (and their relatives in the Netherlands) speak a Central Javanese dialect. It has maintained in some form the high Javanese register which is so typical of Central Javanese, although this is reportedly in decline among young speakers. The language is reasonably well maintained as a home language in the homogenous Javanese village communities but is in competition with Sranan (the English Creole which is the most widely spoken language in Surinam) and Dutch among city dwellers and young people of Javanese descent (Satya Jadoenansing and Koefoed 1991). Sranan is necessary in communication with non-Javanese, and Dutch is necessary for upwards mobility. Serious linguistic documentation of Surinamese Javanese began in 1980 with a four-year project by the University of Surinam in the capital Paramaribo aiming at the description of the three main languages in Surinam, which are, in order of number of speakers, Sranan, Sranami (a creolized form of Hindi/Urdu), and Surinamese Javanese. The project resulted in the publication of a Surinamese Javanese—Dutch dictionary by Vruggink in collaboration with Sarmo in 2001 (Vruggink 2001). An orthography was devised in 1987, which was largely inspired by the ofﬁcial spelling of Sranan and other languages in Surinam. The Surinamese Javanese community has a cultural journal, Cikal, and the beginning of a modern literature in Surinamese Javanese (Vruggink 2001:xxxvi). 32 33

http://home.wanadoo.nl/javas/Vertellingen/PBI/Cursusjavanen.htm. http://www.surinaamsejavanen.homestead.com/javanen.html.

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PART II Linguistic Vitality: Theory, Assessments, and Challenges

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3 Language Endangerment Scenarios: A Case Study from Northern Central Sulawesi Nikolaus P. Himmelmann

3.1 Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to exemplify an approach to language endangerment in which endangerment is not deﬁned with respect to a list of more or less disparate criteria such as number and age of speakers, homogeneity of the speech community, etc. Instead, language endangerment is seen as the possible outcome of an endangerment scenario, i.e. a speciﬁc and complex constellation of varied factors, some of which may be conducive to language shift, others to language maintenance. This concept is illustrated by an attempt to assess the viability of the Tomini-Tolitoli languages, a group of eleven languages/major dialects spoken by some 145,000 people in northern Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Section 3.2 introduces a distinction between the symptoms of language endangerment and its causes and then further deﬁnes and explains the notion of a language endangerment scenario. Section 3.3 provides background information on the TominiTolitoli languages and language area, including some essential notes on its sociology This chapter was ﬁrst presented at the International Workshop on South-East Asian Studies No. 11: The study of endangered languages and literatures of South-East Asia in Leiden in December 1996. I wish to thank the members of the committee on endangered languages (AGBS) of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) and John Wolff for many helpful discussions which have deeply inﬂuenced my understanding of the phenomenon of language endangerment. Some of the general views expressed here are also found in the brochure on endangered languages produced by the AGBS (Arbeitsgruppe Bedrohte Sprachen, 1995, Informationsbroschüre zur Dokumentation von bedrohten Sprachen, Köln: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft). The emigration scenario discussed in section 3.4.1 emerged in conversation with John Wolff. Many thanks to Chuck Grimes, Andrew Pawley, Phil Quick, Hein Steinhauer and Chikao Yoshimura for comments on various versions of this chapter, and Margaret Florey for a very thorough and most helpful ﬁnal editing. The ﬁeldwork on which this chapter is based was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and carried out under the auspices of the Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia (LIPI) and in cooperation with the Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa, Jakarta. I am very grateful for all the support received from these agencies and the large number of individuals (more than one hundred) who contributed to this project. Full acknowledgments may be found in Himmelmann (2001).

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and history. Section 3.4 describes the two basic endangerment scenarios found in Tomini-Tolitoli language communities and then illustrates their possible outcomes by assessing the viability of each Tomini-Tolitoli language and major dialect. Section 3.5 concludes. The chapter draws on those aspects in work on language shift and language death that are relevant to minority groups in a developing nation such as Indonesia, including Dorian (1989); Sasse (1992); Mühlhäusler (1992, 1996); Landry and Allard (1994); Grenoble and Whaley (1998a); Hagège (2000); and Bradley and Bradley (2002). The only in-depth discussion of language shift in Indonesia to date remains Florey (1990). See Florey (2005a) for a brief overview of the overall endangerment situation in insular Southeast Asia.

3.2 Language Endangerment: Factors vs. Scenarios In many discussions of language endangerment it is common to operate with extensive and fairly heterogeneous lists of presumed ‘reasons’ or ‘causes’ of language endangerment (cf., for example, Dressler 1987; Wurm 1996; Crystal 2000). Often the fact that children do not acquire the language any longer is singled out as the most important ‘factor’ contributing to language death. In the present contribution, the discussion of language endangerment is based on the following two assumptions:

r It is useful to make a fairly strict distinction between directly observable symptoms (indications) of language endangerment and their often not so clearly discernible causes.

r It is rarely the case that one or two or three causes or factors lead to language endangerment. Instead, language endangerment results from the speciﬁc and complex constellation of a variety of such factors. A constellation of this kind is called an endangerment scenario in this chapter. Thus, scenario is used here as a technical term and not in the much looser, non-technical sense widely attested in the literature on endangered languages (e.g. Wurm 1996:2). In the remainder of this section, these two assumptions are further elaborated. Excluded from the discussion is one possible scenario for language death, i.e. the complete physical elimination of speech communities through violence, natural disaster, or disease. This scenario differs radically from the other scenarios to be discussed below, all of which involve language shift, a phenomenon absent from, or irrelevant to, the physical elimination scenario. There is, it seems to me, basically one essential symptom for the vitality of a language, i.e. the number and quality of the domains in which it is used. With quality I refer to the importance of a given domain within the overall language ecology in a given speech community, based on the breadth and variety of linguistic behaviour found in that domain. For example, the use of a language in a working environment

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which consists basically of short commands and acknowledgments could be seen as less relevant to the vitality of the language than its use in informal conversations between family members which touches on a broad variety of topics and involves the use of many different linguistic routines. The number of domains is important because different domains often involve different registers. Some linguistic routines may occur only in a given register. Given this view of language vitality, language endangerment may be deﬁned as a rapid decline in the number and quality of domains in which a given language is used. One very important domain is, of course, the interaction between parents (and other caregivers) and children. Note, however, that here the fact that children do not acquire a language any more is viewed as a symptom, and not a cause, of language endangerment. Given the anthropomorphic metaphor of language death it seems admittedly correct to say that a language is going to die because the intergenerational transmission is interrupted. However, when this presumed cause of language endangerment is compared with other presumed causes such as the small number of speakers, forced migration and dispersal of the speech community, the presence of another dominant language in the area, etc., it becomes obvious that the ‘cause’ interrupted intergenerational transmission is of a different nature than the other causes in this list. That is, it is at least one step further down in the causation chain. That children don’t acquire the language any more is not some spontaneous, unpredictable event in the history of a speech community. Instead, it is caused by a variety of factors which may cause other reductions in the usage domains of a given language as well (for example, the use of a new or different language in the educational domain or for trading purposes). A change of language usage in the interaction with children clearly has more dramatic consequences than a change of language in trading interactions. Still, the nature of these changes is similar and they pertain to the same level in the chain of events leading to language shift. This level is called here the level of symptoms of language endangerment and it is strictly distinguished from the level of the causes or factors that play a role in language endangerment scenarios. The assessment of factors leading to language endangerment is much more difﬁcult than the assessment of its symptoms. To my knowledge, there is no factor that can be shown with certainty to cause a language shift. Take, for example, the migration of whole speech communities or individuals. Migration is often seen as playing a major role in language shift, and there are many actual examples where it seems undeniable that this factor is involved (the two scenarios to be discussed below for Tomini-Tolitoli languages, the immigration and the emigration scenarios, are cases in point). However, there is also a substantial number of examples of both individuals and groups where migration does not lead to language shift. In the Tomini-Tolitoli area, for example, there are various settlements populated by Javanese or Balinese (trans-)migrants. Even in the older settlements of this kind (thirty years and older), there is no evidence for a drastic decrease in the vitality of the native languages, Balinese and Javanese,

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respectively. 1 On the individual level, one ﬁnds in practically every Tomini-Tolitoli village a Chinese trader family. Some of these families have been living in the area for two generations and longer. Despite the fact that they often are the only Chinese speaking people in a given location, many of them are bilingual in Indonesian and Chinese, having only a rudimentary knowledge of the local languages. These examples should make it clear that the potential which any single factor might have for inducing language shift is only realized in a speciﬁc and complex constellation of factors, some of which may be conducive to language shift, others to language maintenance. As noted above, the term endangerment scenario is used here to refer to such a constellation of factors which may be observed in a speech community presently undergoing language shift. Connected to this notion is the hypothesis that given a detailed description of a broad variety of endangerment scenarios from all major regions of the world, it will be possible to come up with a typology of endangerment scenarios. Such a typology, in turn, will allow for a better understanding of language endangerment (and its possible ‘cures’) than the list approach, i.e. the attempt to compute degrees of endangerment on the basis of lists of values for presumed endangerment factors. 2

3.3 Tomini-Tolitoli Languages and Language Area3 The part of the northern Sulawesi peninsula inhabited by the Tomini-Tolitoli people is located roughly between the equator and 1◦ north latitude and around 120◦ east longitude. The peninsula is quite narrow in this part, with a chain of steep mountains running south to north, later turning west to east. This chain of mountains divides the area into two coastlines, the west coast being bordered by the Makassar Straits, and the east coast by the Tomini Bay. Table 3.1 lists the eleven major languages belonging to the Tomini-Tolitoli group, arranged in a rough geographical order (beginning in the southwest). The names in parentheses are alternate names used in the literature. The ﬁgures indicate the approximate number of speakers for each of the languages. 4 Neighbouring languages are, in the northeast, Buol (west coast) and Gorontalo (east coast), and in the south, Kaili, a network of closely related dialects which are spoken around the Palu Bay and adjoining areas, including Parigi, a town located on the east coast. The major dialects of this network found on the borders and within the Tomini-Tolitoli area are Tawaili, Ledo, Rai, and Tara. Apart from Buol, which has 1

For an in-depth study of Balinese migrations to Central Sulawesi see G. Davis 1976. Perhaps the most extreme example of this approach is the Language documentation urgency list (LDUL) proposed by D. Zaefferer in Munich (email address: [email protected]). 3 This section contains a brief synopsis of the background chapter in my sourcebook on Tomini-Tolitoli languages (Chapter 2 in Himmelmann 2001). In that chapter, the demographic, geographical, social, and historical aspects mentioned here are discussed in much greater detail. The sourcebook also features a number of maps where all the locations mentioned here can be found. 4 For reasons discussed in Himmelmann (2001:17f.,37), these ﬁgures are far from reliable. 2

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Table 3.1 Tomini-Tolitoli languages and major dialects West coast Balaesang Pendau (Ndau) Dampelas Dondo Totoli (Tolitoli)

ca. 3,200 ca. 3,200 ca. 10,300 ca. 13,000 ca. 25,000

East coast Taje (Petapa) Ampibabo-Lauje Tajio (Kasimbar) Lauje (Tinombo) Tialo (Tomini) Boano (Bolano)

ca. 350 ca. 6,000 ca. 12,000 ca. 38,000 ca. 30,000 ca. 2,700

Total: ca. 143,750

some 65,000 speakers, the other two languages have a substantially higher number of speakers than the Tomini-Tolitoli language group as a whole, Kaili some 300,000 and Gorontalo some 400,000. In terms of present day administrative units, the Tomini-Tolitoli languages are spoken in three districts (Kabupaten) of the province of Central Sulawesi: Donggala, Tolitoli and Parigi-Moutong. 5 The government of Donggala is located in Palu which is also the seat of the provincial government and today the single most dominating centre in all of Central Sulawesi. The government of Tolitoli is located in the town of Tolitoli, ca. 250 km north of Palu on the west coast. 6 The government of ParigiMoutong is found in Parigi, the major town on the east coast. The districts are further divided into subdistricts (kecamatan). Most of the speakers of Tomini-Tolitoli languages are found in thirteen kecamatan, nine on the west coast and four on the east coast. For the ensuing exposition of endangerment scenarios in the Tomini-Tolitoli area, it will be important to take note of the fact that the English word village is used here in reference to a typically Indonesian administrative unit (desa). A desa usually consists of a number of clusters of dwellings, which in turn may vary considerably in size (less than a dozen houses to 100 or more), and in addition includes substantial amounts of cultivated or uncultivated land. It is thus a much more extensive and much less tightly integrated unit than a traditional European village. See Banbara Dix Grimes (2006) for a more comprehensive explication and an investigation of how the modern administrative village structure deviates from the traditional ‘mental’ map of a given area. Following T. Li (1991), the Tomini-Tolitoli area may be divided into the following three distinct agro-ecological zones based on both bio-physical as well as social components: 7 5 Kabupaten Tolitoli was formed only in 1999 by splitting up the former Kabupaten Buol-Tolitoli. Kabupaten Parigi-Moutong is an even more recent creation which became fully operational only in 2003. Formerly, the ﬁve Kecamatan forming this new Kabupaten were part of Kabupaten Donggala. 6 Travelling along the coastline, the distance between Palu and Tolitoli is 438 km. 7 Li’s study pertains to the Tinombo region which is predominantly populated by Lauje, but her results may be applied to the Tomini-Tolitoli area as a whole with a few modiﬁcations (cf. Himmelmann 2001:49f.).

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r the coastal zone is characterized by seasonal rainfall, the vegetation consisting of mangroves, grass, bushes, and light secondary forest. The most conspicuous crops are coconuts and wet rice, but the coastal population often also own gardens in the middle hills. Other sources of income include wage work (hired farm labor and government jobs such as teachers) and ﬁshing. 99 per cent of the coastal population is Islamic, a large majority of them actively taking part in the religious, social, and political life of the village.

r the middle hills are characterized by frequent rainfalls and a mixture of secondary

and primary forest. Middle hill people live at some distance from the coast, often in fact at the foot of the hills or on an inland plain, in village or hamlet-like settlements; they cultivate dry rice, corn and cash crops (shallots, cashews, cocoa, etc.); they are at least nominally Islamic and share the basic values of the coastal population; they are to a large extent integrated in the governmental control- and beneﬁt-system.

r the inner hills are characterized by very frequent rainfalls and deep secondary and

primary forest. Inner hill people live close to the forest frontier in small groups of 2–3 households, plant taro and cassava as their main staple food, eat pigs, do not adapt their values, lifestyle and dressing to coastal standards, and are afﬁliated with either an indigenous religion or Christianity. While inner and middle hill people, to date, seem to form socially and economically fairly homogeneous groups, the coastal population is divided into economic/occupational classes. 8 The majority of the population call themselves farmers. They gain their livelihood through wage work (for the owners of large coconut plantations, sawah (wet-rice ﬁelds) or cash crop gardens), petty trade, and gardening and/or ﬁshing. The professional ﬁshermen form a homogeneously distinct group, who usually do not own their own equipment (and thus have to share the catch with the equipment owner) and who more often than not live in their own hamlet on the shore, the village centre usually being located up to 1 km inland. Another class is formed by the political and educational elite who control the local government and educational institutions, and a substantial part of the fertile coastal land. Finally, there is the very small, but economically the most powerful, class of traders who buy the local cash crops (copra, chocolate, garlic, etc.), ﬁnance rattan expeditions and ﬁshing equipment, run minibus services to Palu and own stores well-stocked with household items, dry goods, hardware, etc. Most traders are Chinese or Buginese. As for the history of the Tomini-Tolitoli area, there are only very few records directly concerned with it up to the most recent times (ca. 1970). This lack of historical records is just one of a number of indications for the fact that the area has been, and continues to be, a peripheral one. It has never been a power centre dominating adjoining areas 8 As Li repeatedly points out, this state of affairs is presently undergoing rapid change through the increased cultivation of cash crops in the hill regions. Since access to fertile land is not evenly distributed, one may see in the near future class distinctions in inner and middle hill areas similar to those on the coast.

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but, instead, has always been at the very fringes of the various powers which have sought to control parts or all of Sulawesi. 9 In the current context of exemplifying the notion of an endangerment scenario, the following fairly well-established historical facts 10 are of major relevance. In the early eighteenth century, powerful Bugis and Mandar kingdoms in South Sulawesi took over the control of the Tomini-Tolitoli coast lines, in cooperation with their Kaili allies who had been subjugated by them earlier on. Their primary goal was to use the largely ‘empty’ coastal planes of the Tomini-Tolitoli area for coconut plantations. To this end, marriages were arranged between male members of the Bugis, Mandar, or Kaili nobility and female members of the Tomini-Tolitoli nobility. The task of the Tomini-Tolitoli nobility was to persuade (or force) their people to move with them from the mountains to the coastal planes and work on the plantations. In several areas this lead to a split between the members of a Tomini-Tolitoli tribe, with part of the population remaining in the mountains (the ancestors of the present day inner and middle hill people) and the other part following their nobility down to the coast (the ancestors of the present day coastal population). 11 From a sociolinguistic point of view, it is important to note that only a few outsiders (Bugis, Mandar, or Kaili) were directly involved in this enterprise. These outsiders settled in the area and learned the language. The pact between the two nobilities was continually renewed through intermarriages according to the same pattern (male Bugis/Mandar/Kaili and female Tomini-Tolitoli). This seems to have happened fairly consistently until about the 1950s as shown by the fact that most members of the present day political elite of the Tomini-Tolitoli coastal population (i.e. the descendants of the former nobility) claim to have at least one continuous chain of Bugis, Mandar or Kaili males in their ancestry. 12 Nevertheless, in the older generation it is the rule rather than the exception that the members of this elite are ﬂuent and competent speakers of a Tomini-Tolitoli language which is generally their ﬁrst (their mother’s) language (they also know Kaili and/or Bugis and Indonesian). This interactional pattern between South Sulawesi and Tomini-Tolitoli changed radically around 1900 (or 1930?) when substantial numbers of poor (common) South Sulawesi people began to migrate to the supposedly still largely empty but fertile 13 land of the Tomini-Tolitoli area. These migrants generally settled in, or close to, the established coastal villages and opened up new locations for their own plantations. They usually arrived with little more than the capital and tools necessary to stake out claims, to clear the forest and buy a ﬁrst set of seedlings. They achieved an 9

See Henley (1989) for a short, but comprehensive outline of the history of Sulawesi. Compare Adriani and Kruyt (1912:117–166, 297–360), Davis (1976:94–105), Masyhuda (1977:9–52), and Nourse (1989:1–101). 11 Cf. Nourse (1989:4–11,69–101) for the Lauje version of these events. 12 It is thus not surprising that many of them have typically South Sulawesi names such as Amerang Hj. Dg. Palipa, Abrahman Dg. Mallawa, etc. 13 Compared to the very fertile volcanic soil found in Java, Bali, or Minahasa, the alluvial soil found in Central Sulawesi is rather poor. Thus, ‘fertile’ here means something like ‘land amenable to agriculture’. 10

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economic position similar to the native Tomini-Tolitoli within a generation or so, often even being economically more successful than the average Tomini-Tolitoli family in a given village. Moreover, they started almost immediately to interact socially with the Tomini-Tolitoli (the nobility probably functioning as an intermediary). The major focus of this migration was the west coast. It happened in various waves and actually continues to the present day, albeit on a much smaller scale. As will be discussed in detail in Section 3.4.2, this migration had a considerable impact on language use in the affected areas. A similar impact can be observed for the rapid change (modernization) engineered by the Indonesian government which has occurred in the region since about 1970. In some areas (in particular in the town of Tolitoli and its vicinity), this change occurred extremely fast because of the economically very successful introduction of new cash crops such as cloves (for which there was a boom in the 1970s but the value has since dropped considerably). The ﬁrst and major innovation was the establishment of an extensive network of primary schools (all villages and most settlement projects today have at least one primary school, referred to as SD in Indonesian), followed by health centres, sealed roads, electricity, and television. That is, at least the coastal zones have become fully integrated parts of modern Indonesia. The power centre, of course, continues to be in Palu and the provincial government is dominated by Kaili (and people from South Sulawesi) but a number of Tomini-Tolitoli participate in the local government on the district and subdistrict levels, especially in the newly created districts Tolitoli and Parigi-Moutong. As for the middle and inner hill regions, considerable efforts have been made by the Indonesian government, missionaries and foreign aid development projects to integrate their population in the modernization process. Resettlement projects, which have the task of bringing the inner hill people closer to the coastal village centres, have been established for nearly all inner hill people. The exception are the inner hill Lauje in the Tinombo and Tomini subdistricts, as further elaborated at the end of Section 3.4.2.3. 14

3.4 Endangerment Scenarios in the Tomini-Tolitoli Area 3.4.1 Basic scenarios Leaving aside the speciﬁc features distinguishing individual speech communities in the Tomini-Tolitoli area, two basic scenarios for language endangerment may be discerned:

r the immigration scenario in which members of another speech community from outside the area ‘take over’ a Tomini-Tolitoli speech community. 14 Some of the inner hill Lauje are ‘taken care of ’—so at least it is perceived by the district and provincial administrations—by New Tribes Missionaries who have been operating in the mountains above Tinombo since the 1970s.

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r the emigration scenario in which there is a substantial, though temporary migration of members of a Tomini-Tolitoli speech community to educational and/or occupational centers in- and outside the Tomini-Tolitoli area. Before commenting in more detail on these two basic scenarios it is important to notice the following: the names as well as the brief characterizations of these two scenarios make reference to one factor (immigration and emigration, respectively). This is not to be interpreted as claiming that these are single, isolable factors causing the presently observable language endangerment in the area. Instead, as already discussed in Section 3.2, the scenarios consist of a complex constellation of a variety of factors, of which the two factors chosen for naming and characterizing the two scenarios are arguably the most conspicuous ones. The following discussion explores the sociostructural factors relevant to the two basic scenarios. It will come as no surprise to learn that they share many factors since they both involve migrations. An effort is made in any given instance to point out examples where the factor under discussion has not induced language shift, thus providing empirical support for the present approach which holds that it is never a lone factor that induces language shift. The two scenarios are based on participant observation and informal conversations. I travelled the whole area during two longer ﬁeld trips (1988 and 1993), and one shorter trip in 2002. Altogether 12 months were spent on location, the time allocated for the visit of a given settlement or village varying between one day and six weeks. In all the locations mentioned below, I spent at least two weeks (exceptions to this rule are explicitly indicated). 3.4.1.1 IMMIGRATION SCENARIO The ﬁrst point to note with respect to the immigration scenario is that the migrants actually have to occupy settlements and farmland which were inhabited and used before exclusively by the Tomini-Tolitoli speech community. That is, there are both past and present examples of migrations into the area which have not affected the viability of Tomini-Tolitoli speech communities. In the past, Bajau have settled in various places on the east and west coasts (e.g. Pomolulu in Kecamatan Balaesang, Simatang in Kecamatan Dampal Utara, Bajo in Kecamatan Moutong). These settlements are usually located either directly on the coast line or on smaller off-shore islands, i.e. locations not inhabited by Tomini-Tolitoli people. The interaction between Bajau and Tomini-Tolitoli seems to have been conﬁned largely to trade, with the Bajau providing ﬁsh and the Tomini-Tolitoli produce (there is one example of closer social interaction, including quite a few intermarriages, which will be discussed in Section 3.4.2.3). Examples of modern migrations which (so far) have not affected the viability of Tomini-Tolitoli speech communities are the various large transmigration projects found throughout the area, generally populated by Javanese and/or Balinese migrants (e.g. Budi and Karya Mukti in Kecamatan Dampelas, Kota Raya in Kecamatan Tomini). The projects are located in extensive inland plains which were ‘empty’ before in the

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sense that there were no permanent Tomini-Tolitoli settlements or extensive clusters of garden locations in these plains. 15 At present, the interaction between TominiTolitoli and transmigrants is conﬁned to small scale trade (mostly produce sold by the transmigrants to the Tomini-Tolitoli). A second point to note with respect to the immigration scenario is that a certain proportion of migrants is necessary in order for there to be an impact on language usage in the community. It is difﬁcult to specify this number with any degree of precision. Perhaps most important in this regard is the fact that in Tomini-Tolitoli speech communities it does not take a large number of speakers of another language in order to change language usage. According to my observations, the following interrelated phenomena are found today in most villages with a population of about 20 per cent (or more) non-Tomini-Tolitoli:

r the migrants do not even have a rudimentary knowledge of the Tomini-Tolitoli language;

r whenever a non-Tomini-Tolitoli is present in a communicative situation either Indonesian or some other mutually available language (Bugis or Kaili) is used;

r the language of the public domain (meetings, political discussions, much of the everyday talk that can be overheard in the streets) is Indonesian. This observation is to be contrasted with the following two. First, if there are only a few ‘outsiders’ in a village, one or two Chinese or Bugis trader families, for example, then these ‘outsiders’ will understand enough of the local Tomini-Tolitoli language to follow everyday conversations. They will also have a fair command of some basic formulae and patterns of this language (but rarely be ﬂuent speakers). Second, in villages where migrants form a majority, the Tomini-Tolitoli will be ﬂuent in the majority language, usually Kaili or Bugis. In villages with a more varied population there is a strong tendency for Indonesian to be the general public domain language. However, given that Bugis form a strong minority in the overall population (say 30 per cent) then Buginese will also be used in the public domain. The preceding remarks pertain only to the interaction between Tomini-Tolitoli and out-of-area migrants. If speakers of two different Tomini-Tolitoli languages settle in the same village, it is always the case that the ‘newcomers’ have a complete command of the local language. It is, however, extremely rare that a substantial number of TominiTolitoli migrates to an established Tomini-Tolitoli settlement (the major example is the migration of Lauje to Dondo and Tialo settlements in Kecamatan Dondo and Tomini). 16 15 It is highly likely, however, that these plains were used to some extent by Tomini-Tolitoli middle and inner hill people. This is suggested by the fact that one ﬁnds various resettlement projects scattered around most transmigration areas. 16 Lauje is very similar, and closely related, to Dondo and Tialo. Dondo and Tialo are even more closely related to each other and could be considered dialects of a single language (cf. Himmelmann 2001:20).

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A somewhat special case in this regard appears to be the village of Lakuan located at the border between Totoli and Buol speaking areas (forming the northeastern-most boundary of the Tomini-Tolitoli area). Here Totoli is clearly the dominant language despite the fact that a large part of the population claims to have Buol or Dondo ancestry. A third point to note with respect to the immigration scenario is that the occupational or class background of migrants does not seem to be of particular importance for their impact on the usage of the Tomini-Tolitoli language. Migrants fall in two broad classes with respect to socioeconomic status and power. On the one hand, there are government ofﬁcials (administrators, police, teachers) and traders, who usually own some land and/or capital, the former also having considerable political inﬂuence and high social prestige. On the other hand, there are poor South Sulawesi farmers who are looking for unclaimed patches of farmable land. For both classes of migrants, the impact they have on patterns of language use seems to depend essentially on their relative numbers (see above). As far as any differences in their impact may be discerned, these pertain to more circumstantial aspects such as the likelihood of a given location to attract one or the other class of migrants in substantial numbers. A substantial number of government ofﬁcials and traders is found only in administrative centres (most of the subdistrict capitals belong in this category). In these centres there is, in general, no space for migrant farmers. Thus, migrant farmers are found in ‘normal’ villages. A second difference pertains to the fact that migrant farmers usually come in larger groups (and therefore quite generally make a noticeable impact on linguistic usage in the village they settle) while the number of traders and government ofﬁcials in ‘normal’ villages is very small (but there is practically no village without at least one trader and one or two teachers who are not natives of the village). A fourth aspect of the immigration scenario is the degree to which the original population and more recently arrived migrants intermingle. Upon arrival, the newcomers usually have to settle at the periphery of a village. 17 Hence it is not surprising that in many villages some quarters (dusun) are heavily (or exclusively) populated by speakers of a Tomini-Tolitoli language, while others are mostly populated by speakers of an out-of-area language. While in administrative centres this pattern can be maintained over generations, in the villages it may change as fast as within one or two generations. The most important factor in this change is intermarriage, for which the most common pattern is to have a migrant man proposing to a Tomini-Tolitoli woman (a pattern already followed by the nobles in former centuries (see Section 3.3 above)). The relevance of this change for patterns of language use is this: as long as the population of a dusun is fairly homogeneous, the common everyday language in the dusun will be the native language of its inhabitants (i.e. a Tomini-Tolitoli language in a Tomini-Tolitoli dusun, Buginese in a Bugis dusun, etc.). As soon as a dusun becomes 17 Possible exceptions to this general ‘rule’ are instances where a sizeable fraction of the original village population has died at once (through violence, natural catastrophes, or disease), thus allowing the new arrivals to move into locations in the village centre.

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more heterogeneous with respect to linguistic afﬁliations, either Indonesian or, if it was originally inhabited mainly by migrants, the migrants’ native language becomes the medium of everyday conversation. I have not come across an instance where a TominiTolitoli language dominates in a quarter shared by Tomini-Tolitoli and a substantial minority group of out-of-area migrants. Note that the sociolinguistic impact of intermingling on the dusun level is much more pervasive than the impact of intermingling on the village level. On the village level, this impact is generally restricted to the public domain, often only to the more formal interactions in the public domain (such as school, village meeting, paying an ofﬁcial visit to the village head, etc.). On the dusun level it potentially encompasses all linguistic domains. Minimally, it inﬂuences all linguistic interactions from which the next door neighbours are not to be excluded. Given that the yard surrounding a house and the ‘living room’ (i.e. the space in a house designated for entertaining guests) are semi-public spaces in which the neighbours have a ‘right’ to know what’s going on, the domains not directly inﬂuenced by the linguistic norms holding at the dusun-level are the kind of linguistic interactions that take place in the kitchen and the space allocated to eating (sometimes part of the kitchen) and sleeping. In the case of intermarriages, a non-Tomini-Tolitoli language will be used in these spaces as well. Exempt from the general ‘rule’ stated in the preceding paragraph are older speakers (70 and above). These speakers tend to use their native language when conversing among themselves as well as when conversing with younger people (provided these know the language). In both instances it is considered socially acceptable that some of the people present in the communicative situation are excluded from the conversation in the sense that they are unable to fully understand what is being said. One major reason for this exception seems to be the fact that older speakers often only have a poor command of the ‘new’ everyday language. In other words, in those instances where older speakers are ﬂuent in the dominant non-Tomini-Tolitoli language they will also use this language in everyday interaction. As brieﬂy mentioned above, the three major candidates for being the everyday language in a dusun with mixed population are Indonesian, Bugis, and Kaili. Kaili is often well known by older speakers of a Tomini-Tolitoli language because it seems to have been a lingua franca in the area for quite some time (200–300 years?). Hence it is least likely to ﬁnd older speakers regularly using a Tomini-Tolitoli language in a dusun (or village) where Kaili has become the everyday language. Similar observations hold for some parts of the west coast where Bugis has been a dominant language for at least 100 years (in particular, northern Dampelas-Sojol, Dampal Selatan, and Dampal Utara). Overall, it holds true that of the said three languages, Indonesian is least known among the older generation of Tomini-Tolitoli speakers. Note, however, that there is a substantial minority of older speakers who are ﬂuent and competent speakers of Indonesian. A ﬁfth aspect of the immigration scenario pertains to the location of the farmed land with respect to the village centre. Wet-rice ﬁelds (sawah) and coconut plantations are

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generally found in the environs of the village. Hence it is possible to work these sites from the home in the village. Garden locations, on the other hand, can be located at a considerable distance from the village centre. Working there means commuting between the village home and a temporary lodging in the garden. The time spent in the garden is essentially determined by economic factors. If the garden is the major source of a family’s income it is not unusual for such a family to spend most of its time in the garden, paying only occasional visits to the village centre (on market days, for example). A major conﬂict arises when a family has children of school age. Since the school is always located in the village centre, this means that the family is either split between village home and garden location or that the children only sporadically attend school. The latter is the clearly disfavoured option chosen only if the garden requires the work of all family members at a time. Well-to-do families hire labour for doing most of the work in the garden, paying only occasional visits to the garden location. Those who have a job in the village centre (teachers, for example) work their gardens irregularly. The relevance of this factor is to be seen in relation to the preceding one: the garden locations are generally inhabited only by the nuclear family (parents and unmarried children), the next neighbour being relatively far away (at least 100 metres). Thus, language usage in the garden is solely determined by the family members. If husband and wife are native speakers of a Tomini-Tolitoli language, the family will use this TominiTolitoli language for everyday conversation. The more time spent in the garden the less the linguistic usage within the nuclear family is inﬂuenced by the linguistic norms on the dusun and village levels. To conclude this discussion of the immigration scenario, note that none of the factors mentioned necessarily leads to language shift. Although the arrival of a substantial number of migrants in a given area certainly has some impact on language usage everywhere in the world, none of the factors mentioned above excludes the possibility that a situation of stable bilingualism arises in the wake of the migration. As far as I could ascertain, it is not the case that the migrants violently entered Tomini-Tolitoli territory and subjugated the native population, forcing their linguistic and cultural practices on them. Instead, the Tomini-Tolitoli seem to adjust themselves readily to the migrants. This is particularly obvious in those instances where a relatively small minority of migrants (20–30 per cent of the overall population) has a considerable impact on linguistic usage. I will return brieﬂy to this issue in section 3.4.1.3 after discussing the emigration scenario, for which the same observation holds. 3.4.1.2 EMIGRATION SCENARIO The emigration scenario is characterized by the following cluster of interrelated factors: apart from farming, all other work opportunities open to Tomini-Tolitoli people require them to live outside their native village for an extended period of time. At present, there is actually just one such alternative work opportunity, i.e. to work for the government. There is hardly any industry in the whole province of Central Sulawesi, and the few ﬁshery and logging companies that exist are

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ﬁnanced by foreign capital and bring their own labour. The trading networks are ﬁrmly controlled by Bugis and Chinese traders and generally do not involve Tomini-Tolitoli people (apart from a few people who function as the local representative of a larger company at the village level). Government employees work either in the extensive administrative network established by the Indonesian government since 1965 (the basic layout of the national administration is copied at the provincial, district and subdistricts levels) or in the educational sector (most teachers are government employees 18 ). With the exception of primary school teachers, they rarely work in, or close to, their native villages, at least not early in their careers. That is, they live and work in an environment where Indonesian is the everyday language. Of some importance in this regard is the fact that there are special housing programmes for government employees, a factor contributing to their relative isolation from the surrounding community. A fairly typical example is a high school (or more precisely: upper secondary school, usually referred to as SMA in Indonesia), of which there are quite a few in the larger villages throughout Central Sulawesi. The teachers in such a school usually come from a variety of linguistic backgrounds, including the native languages of North, Central, and South Sulawesi, and Balinese. The teachers’ houses are built on the school ground. They converse in Indonesian among themselves and interact only minimally with the community in which the school is located. The relevance of this scenario for usage patterns consists of the fact that Indonesian is also the language commonly used at home even if husband and wife share the same native language. Most importantly, their children acquire Indonesian as their native language and hardly acquire much knowledge about any other language (depending on the degree of contact and interaction with grandparents and other relatives, which will be commented on shortly). Note that this phenomenon is not restricted to the families of Tomini-Tolitoli speakers but pertains to all families of government employees irrespective of their linguistic background (at least in the parts of Central Sulawesi I have visited). It also includes, for example, Bugis 19 who otherwise are known to display a particularly strong allegiance to their native language. Moreover, this is not a recent phenomenon. Several government ofﬁcials I met—who were in their thirties and forties and whose parents were also government employees—claimed to have grown up learning only Indonesian and knowing only bits and pieces of native Sulawesi languages. So far, the exposition of the emigration scenario has been concerned with the nuclear family. However, the impact of this scenario is not conﬁned to the nuclear family but may also affect language usage in the native village of such families. This is so because the ‘migrant’ family remains closely linked to the village by a bundle of personal and 18 There are a number of private schools in the area sponsored by Islamic organizations. Their number has increased constantly during the 1990s and in late 2002 there was such a school in almost every village. 19 The Bugis in the area typically work in the administrative sector (including the judicial system) rather than as teachers.

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economic ties. Economically, such a family often will own some land in the native village which, though not worked by themselves but by hired labour, provides a highly welcome additional income. In fact, the cash income earned through the government position often allows more senior employees to extend their property in the native village. 20 The existence of such property ensures that government employees return regularly to their native village. It is also a strong incentive to seek appointments close to the native village during the later stages of one’s career 21 and to return for good to the village on retirement (the regular retirement age is 55). The impact such government employed families may have on language usage in their native village is very similar to that of the out-of-area migrants discussed above with respect to the immigration scenario. As in the immigration scenario, these families have a noticeable impact on usage patterns only if a certain number of them is present in a given dusun. They then will form a network of people who consistently use Indonesian when talking among themselves. They are used to speaking Indonesian at home and their children do not know the native language of the village. Their relatives and neighbours will tend to assimilate to this state of affairs and also use Indonesian in most interactions with these families. Apart from this direct inﬂuence the families of government employees have through their actual linguistic practices, there is also a more subtle and indirect inﬂuence. In general, such families will enjoy a relatively high social prestige because of their education and their economic power. Their good command of Indonesian is seen as one major factor in their success. Hence, all families aspiring to similar achievements will tend to emphasize the use of Indonesian in their linguistic interactions. Some families actually adopt an Indonesian-only policy in conversing with their children even if their economic resources are fairly limited (and hence the prospect of a higher education for their children rather dim). The major ‘prerequisite’ for the emigration scenario, then, is that a number of families are present in one village and generation with the economic means to afford a higher education for (some of ) their children. Becoming a government employee is a lengthy and expensive process because one has to pass middle school (‘lower secondary school’ or SMP) and high school (SMA) and do some basic course work at university. Since SMPs and SMAs are not found in every village, the students have to leave their families and live as boarders in larger villages or administrative centres. To receive a university education they have to move to the provincial capital, Palu, or even further away to Makassar (formerly Ujung Pandang) in South Sulawesi, or to Surabaya in Java. 20 It is very difﬁcult to acquire land for gardens close to the location of an employee’s work because most of the land in the vicinity will be already in somebody’s possession. This holds in particular of the cities (Palu and Tolitoli) but is also true for all subdistrict capitals. Furthermore, for many employees it would not make much sense to acquire land close to their work location because they are very often shifted between various work locations, in particular in the wake of promotions. 21 New government employees are expected to take on inconvenient assignments as a sign of their gratitude for having been accepted into government service. They also lack the contacts and experience necessary for inﬂuencing one’s appointments.

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Given that the extensive network of primary schools presently found in the area has only been built up since the early 1970s, it should not come as a surprise that up to that date very few Tomini-Tolitoli families were aware of the possibilities of education. Thus, one ﬁnds only a few Tomini-Tolitoli teachers who are ﬁfty years old or older, and even fewer Tomini-Tolitoli in the same age bracket in other government positions (the positions are generally on the subdistrict level and never exceed the district level). These older Tomini-Tolitoli government employees are usually part of the traditional elite whose economic power rests on their extensive coconut plantations and the relations with their Kaili and South Sulawesi kin, established and continually renewed by intermarriage for at least 200 years (cf. Section 3.3 above). The 1970s not only brought more accessible primary schools but also a ﬁrst boom in cash crops other than coconuts, which allowed many of the poorer relatives of the old elite to pursue careers in the rapidly expanding government agencies. That is, within the generation of the thirty and forty year olds there are several areas within the Tomini-Tolitoli region where the effects of the emigration scenario are clearly visible (details in Section 3.4.2.2). Note that, at present, the overall impact of this scenario is still relatively minor since there are not many villages where enough people have the economic power to pursue careers outside the village. In the not too distant future, however, it may well turn out to be the major scenario for a quickly progressing language shift in those areas which to date have remained relatively unaffected by the immigration scenario (but see the qualiﬁcations in Section 3.4.2.3). 3.4.1.3 COMMONALITIES AND ‘DEEPER CAUSES’ In concluding this section, note that the two scenarios are partially in complementary distribution: only areas where extensive stretches of land have been cultivated for some time have the economic potential for the emigration scenario. Extensive cultivation precludes one instantiation of the immigration scenario, i.e. the one involving farming migrants, since there is no land left for newcomers to cultivate. Conversely, areas with lots of ‘empty’ space inviting newcomers to settle permanently lack the economic potential for temporary migrations in pursuit of higher education. Furthermore, both scenarios also share some more or less circumstantial factors which potentially contribute to the ongoing language shift. These include the following three:

r the extensive network of primary schools throughout the area which was already mentioned above. This is correlated with the fact that in all villages there is at least one linguistic domain in which Indonesian is the dominant language. The decentralization policy setting in in Indonesia after the fall of the Suharto government in 1998 has brought more autonomy to regional and local government agencies, including the educational sector (compare, for example, Indonesian Government Regulation No. 25/2000 on educational decentralization and Law No 20/2003 on the National Education System). Primary schools now have the option to include

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classes in the local vernacular in their curriculum, but to date (i.e. 2007) little use has been made of this option. 22

r the rapid introduction of television which began in the late 1980s. In 1993 at least one or two television sets were found in practically every village. The social consequences of the introduction of television are quite noticeable, because watching television has become almost immediately the most favoured evening entertainment. The programmes are nowadays almost all in Indonesian or have at least Indonesian subtitles (in the early days of Indonesian television, many English language series and movies were shown, often with few or no subtitles).

r the much improved transportation system—better roads providing for faster,

cheaper and more regular transportation—which allows a higher degree of general mobility. This is particularly relevant for the emigration scenario since it gives the employees in the administrative centers the possibility to spend weekends and short holidays in their native villages. This used to be impossible at times when most journeys took a minimum of 8–10 hours and were highly unpredictable because of constantly changing road conditions. More importantly perhaps, both scenarios as outlined here are similar in that they pertain to the somewhat shallow or superﬁcial level of the outwardly observable. That is, one could easily argue that they do not get to the ‘real’ or ‘deeper’ causes of language shift. Thus, for example, it is obvious that the migratory movements which play an essential role in both scenarios are not spontaneous happenings which are not amenable to further explanation or motivation. Instead, they most certainly have their deeper causes in economic motives and forces. The farmers migrating to the TominiTotoli area all come from heavily overpopulated areas (South Sulawesi, Java, Bali) where it is hardly possible to get access to enough land to support oneself and a family by farming. Young members of Tomini-Tolitoli speech communities want to get a better education in order to be able to get better paid and relatively secure jobs. While there can be no doubt about the relevance of such deeper economic forces, I would hold that the kind of more ‘superﬁcial’ scenario sketched here still is an important facet in a coherent and comprehensive theory of language endangerment. We will return to this point in the conclusion (Section 3.5). Another aspect of both scenarios that demands explanation on a deeper level pertains to the fact that in both scenarios it is possible for a minority to inﬂuence the linguistic usage patterns of a majority of native Tomini-Tolitoli in the direction of a reduction in the usage domains of the Tomini-Tolitoli language. Most importantly, in both scenarios it is not at all obvious why the changes induced by the arrival of out-of-area migrants or a substantial number of native government employees do not lead to relatively stable bi- or multilingual settings. This is particularly surprising 22 See Mochtar (2005) for a ﬁrst investigation of the impact of the new policy options on curriculum development and language maintenance in the area, focusing on Totoli.

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because multilingualism seems to have been the norm in the area for centuries. And bilingualism is the norm for many of the out-of-state migrants, such as the Bugis, Chinese, and Bajau, many of whom are bilingual in Indonesian and their native languages. It seems to me that none of the sociostructural factors discussed so far can account for this essential aspect. It is also not obvious whether and how the individual decisions leading to mono- rather than multilingualism could be conditioned by economic factors or considerations (other than in a trivializing Marxist view that all social cognition and behaviour is rooted in economic power relations). Instead, it seems necessary to turn to factors related to social psychology and their sociohistorical sources in order to address this question in a fruitful manner. This is a topic well beyond the scope of this chapter and the expertise of its author. Two relatively superﬁcial aspects of relevance for such a study, however, are fairly clear. First, the Tomini-Tolitoli area has been, and continues to be, at the outer periphery of a power and dominance network whose main centre is in Makassar (controlled by Bugis and Makasar) and whose intermediary centre today is in Palu (controlled by Kaili and migrants from South Sulawesi). This has been the case for at least two hundred, probably three hundred years. One small piece of evidence for this power network is the fact that the predecessors of the present university in Palu, Universitas Tadulako, were two out-of-state branches of higher education institutions in Makassar, i.e. Universitas Hasanuddin and IKIP (teachers college) Ujung Pandang. These two branches were integrated into the new Universitas Tadulako in 1981. The majority of the staff of the present Universitas Tadulako continues to be from South Sulawesi. Second, many Tomini-Tolitoli speakers admit that they feel ashamed (Indonesian malu) to use their native language in the presence of native speakers of out-of-area languages such as Kaili, Bugis or Gorontalo (but not Balinese or Chinese!). Several times I met people who tried to hide their linguistic afﬁliations, claiming to be native speakers of Buginese. 3.4.2 The present state of the Tomini-Tolitoli languages From the preceding discussion one prognosis clearly emerges: if the Tomini-Tolitoli languages have a future at all, it will be as part of a complex language ecology which involves at least one non-Tomini-Tolitoli language, dominating the linguistic interactions in the political, administrative and educational domains, i.e. Indonesian. This is not a totally new scenario since individual and societal bi- and multilingualism have been a common phenomenon in the area for quite a long time. What is threatened, however, is the relative stability of the former bi- and multilingual settings and the role the Tomini-Tolitoli languages had to play in these settings. The ongoing sociocultural changes will affect the usage of the Tomini-Tolitoli languages, generally in the direction of a reduction in their use. Inasmuch as all Tomini-Tolitoli languages face (further) reductions in their usage domains, it can be claimed that they are all endangered. Such an assessment, however, is of fairly

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limited value since it obfuscates the quite substantial differences that exist between the various speech communities with respect to their potential of (re-)developing a stable multilingual setting which includes a Tomini-Tolitoli language. Taking this potential as the major parameter, a fairly broad distinction between three kinds of Tomini-Tolitoli speech communities can be made:

r those where the prerequisites for a stable multilingual setting including a TominiTolitoli language no longer seem to exist. The Tomini-Tolitoli languages in these communities may be characterized as moribund.

r those where it is unlikely that a stable multilingual setting including a Tomini-

Tolitoli language will re-emerge. Here one could distinguish various degrees of likelihood (‘from highly unlikely’ to ‘not very likely’). The Tomini-Tolitoli languages in these communities may be characterized as endangered.

r those where there is, in principle, a potential for a prominent role of the Tomini-

Tolitoli language in the emerging new language ecology, provided that the process of language shift currently in its incipient stages is brought to a halt. The Tomini-Tolitoli languages in these communities may be characterized as vital, but long-term endangered. The following review of the present state of the Tomini-Tolitoli languages is organized in accordance with these three broad classes. 3.4.2.1 MORIBUND LANGUAGES Moribund languages are here deﬁned as languages whose domains of use are already extremely limited and, in particular, do not include any longer regular verbal interactions with children. Typically, speakers still having a relatively full command of the language are in their ﬁfties or older. There are two such languages in the area, i.e. Taje and Dampal. In both cases the present state is a consequence of the immigration scenario. The Dampal were the original settlers in the area between Ogoamas (northern tip of Sojol) and Bangkir (Dampal Selatan). Today, there are only very few, not more than 300, native Dampal left. Most of them are intermarried with Bugis and do not speak Dampal any more. Bugis and Mandar have been migrating to the area since about 1920 and dominate it today (95 per cent of the present population, i.e. ca. 20,000 people, are Bugis or Mandar). Reportedly, a disastrous smallpox epidemic occurred among the Dampal in 1919, when 800 families (ca. 3,500 people?) died within three months. That is, the area seems to have been largely depopulated in the very early stages of the migration of South Sulawesi farmers to the Tomini-Tolitoli region. Dampal probably was a dialect of Dampelas, a language spoken some 100 kilometres to the south of the present-day location of the Dampal. The two populations must have been separated for quite some time since they hardly know of each other. I stayed for about 3 weeks in the Dampal area and managed to unearth only tiny fragments of information about the Dampal and their language (in the more vital communities about ten times as much information was gathered in the same amount

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of time). Most of the few rememberers that I met—none of them younger than ﬁfty— had problems in providing basic lexical information (the Swadesh 200 word list). Only two speakers seemed to have achieved some ﬂuency in their childhood and were able to provide a short text and a few elicited clauses. Both of them have died since. The Taje are the original settlers of Petapa, a village located at the southernmost end of Tomini-Tolitoli area on the east coast, close to Parigi. The distance to the next location of a group of Tomini-Tolitoli speakers (i.e. Sidole) is ca. 50 km. Petapa’s population of 1568 (1992 census) consists of two Kaili groups, Tara and Rai, and Taje. Today, the Tara are the dominant group in terms of numbers of speakers (more than 50 per cent of the village population), economically and linguistically. Truly native Taje, i.e. both parents being Taje, are few. Estimates varied around 15 per cent of the village population (ca. 200 people). There are, however, considerably more people who know some Taje because one parent was Taje. That these people know some Taje at all is probably due to the fact that most of the Taje live in one dusun (Kamonji) which is separated by a few rice ﬁelds from the other parts of the village. Most Taje claimed that they didn’t know the language very well and pointed to one older man as the one person who really knew the language (and the one to ask questions about the language). In eliciting lexical items, the four contributors I worked with made an effort to ﬁnd words that are different from Rai or Tara (which did not always produce satisfactory results). In eliciting and recording clauses, however, many Tara and Rai items surfaced, bearing witness to the fact that Taje in Petapa is heavily inﬂuenced by these languages. There are two more groups of Taje who live in resettlement projects further north. One project is located in Sidole (50 km north of Petapa) where about 150 Taje live together with as many Ampibabo-Lauje. The other project is located in Sienjo (another 30 km further up the coast) where about 30 Taje settle together with about twice as many Tajio. Both projects were established in 1982. Before that time the inhabitants of the two projects were middle or inner hill people. The interaction between the members of the two Tomini-Tolitoli groups in these projects remains to be investigated. At present, no informed prognosis as to the future pattern of language usage in these settlements are possible. 23 Note, however, that the vicinity of Sidole is dominated by Ampibabo-Lauje and Rai, and the vicinity of Sienjo by Tajio and Ledo/Rai. In concluding this section it may be well to remember two points: ﬁrst, language death in the kinds of setting just mentioned is a very slow and gradual process. Second, the assessment proposed here is not based on a detailed long-term study of the communities. Hence, in particular in the case of Taje, it is very well possible that important domains of language usage involving Taje have been missed. Both points 23 This presupposes that the projects develop into permanent settlements. About one third of the resettlement projects in the Tomini-Tolitoli area resolved after the government sponsorship came to an end. Note that I visited the Sienjo settlement only very brieﬂy (one day) and stayed close to the Sidole settlement for about one week.

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are nicely illustrated by the fact that Taje was already declared to be nearly extinct by Adriani, who made a voyage along the Tomini coast in 1902 (cf. Noorduyn 1991:71)! 3.4.2.2 ENDANGERED LANGUAGES As noted in the introduction to this section, endangered languages are here deﬁned as languages whose usage domains are presently undergoing a rapid reduction. This reduction manifests itself, inter alia, in the fact that the linguistic competence of speakers under twenty is extremely varied, ranging from highly ﬂuent speakers who use the language every day to speakers with a primarily passive competence. For the latter ones, linguistic interactions involving the native language are restricted to conversations with their grandparents. In such interactions, the grandparents would often use the Tomini-Tolitoli language while the grandchildren would respond in Indonesian. For all Tomini-Tolitoli languages there are some speech communities where the Tomini-Tolitoli language may be considered endangered in this sense. This holds in particular for most major administrative and commercial centres, such as Sabang (Dampelas), Tolitoli (Totoli), Ampibabo (Ampibabo-Lauje), Kasimbar (Tajio), and Moutong (Tialo). 24 In these centres, language usage is inﬂuenced by both the emigration scenario and the immigration scenario. In Tolitoli, for example, a town of more than 30,000 inhabitants, less than half of the population belong to the original settlers of the area, i.e. the Totoli. The remainder of the population consists mostly of people from outside the Tomini-Tolitoli area, including Buol, Bajau, Bugis, Mandar, Gorontalo, Javanese, Balinese, Chinese and Arabs, who have come to this town because of its extensive administrative body (Tolitoli city is the capital of the district (Kabupaten) Tolitoli), its educational facilities or for trading purposes. Of the four (administrative) villages which together form the town of Tolitoli, there is only one, Nalu, where the Totoli are in the majority. And it is this village where Totoli is still used as an everyday language in some quarters. However, even in Nalu Totoli is on the wane, not so much because of the substantial number of migrants that live there, but because it is a very prosperous area. Many of Nalu’s inhabitants made a (small) fortune during the clove boom in the 1970s. This enabled them to send (some of ) their children to university in Palu or Makassar. Many of these children were able to secure government jobs. The consequences have been described above in the emigration scenario: the young government employees live for extended times outside Nalu, speak only Indonesian with their family, but return regularly to Nalu and have a non-negligible inﬂuence on linguistic usage there. The same holds to an even larger degree for the other villages which form a part of Tolitoli city. In these villages it is rare to ﬁnd a ﬂuent speaker below the age of ﬁfty. This scenario, however, is not conﬁned to administrative centres. There are, for example, six other villages in the Tolitoli plain where Totoli used to be the everyday language. Here, as in the town of Tolitoli, the immigration scenario and the emigration scenario mutually reinforce each other: the Totoli permanently living in the 24

The exception is the subdistrict capital Tinombo which will be discussed in the next section.

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village are now a minority because of out-of-area migrants and because a substantial minority of the younger generation studies or works outside the native village. Under the inﬂuence of the ‘outsiders’, the permanent residents shift towards Indonesian as their everyday language. Another example are the ﬁve villages on the west coast (in Kecamatan Sojol) where Lauje used to be the everyday language (many more Lauje live on the east coast and in the inner hills between the two coastal locations; cf. Section 3.4.2.3). Buginese and Kaili migrants have come to these ﬁve villages (Siboang, Siwalempu, Balukang, Bou, and Pesik) in substantial numbers, and they continue to increase rapidly to this day. A particularly drastic example is the village of Bou. When I stayed there in 1988, the Kaili and a few Bugis settled on the fringes of the village centre, separated from the Lauje dusun by a coconut grove. In 1993, the area occupied by Bugis was about ten times the size it had in 1988, extending right into the Lauje dusun and reversing centre and periphery: the Lauje are now on the fringes of a Bugis/Kaili village. The languages mentioned so far in this section are also spoken in other communities where their status does not seem to be in imminent danger (see the following section). There are, however, two languages, Dampelas and Balaesang, which seem to be endangered in all the communities in which they are still part of the linguistic ecology. In both cases the emigration scenario plays an important role. Dampelas speakers are found in eight villages in Kecamatan Dampelas. In seven of these villages, there are strong migrant communities and the everyday language in the public domain is exclusively Indonesian (the immigration scenario). The population of the remaining village, Talaga, is 99 per cent Dampelas. Talaga is considered to be the original settlement place of the Dampelas and the place where the ’best’ Dampelas is spoken. It is located on the shores of a beautiful small lake. Lake and village are encircled by a small hill chain which sets them off both from the sea (to the west) and a very large plain which extends south, east, and north of Talaga. This natural geographic boundary is probably the reason why Talaga has not become a place to settle for the many migrants who have been attracted to the large plain. The hill slopes surrounding Talaga are relatively fertile, in particular for cash crops (other than coconuts). Since the 1960s the village has witnessed a continuous economic growth which has provided at least one third of the families with the means to have some of their children go to Palu for better schooling and university. Note that sending their children off to school in Palu means considerable hardship for the members of the family staying in the village. That is, although these families are relatively well off in the sense that they do not have to worry about their daily subsistence, the higher education for their children comes at considerable personal expense. Among other things, it involves tight restrictions on the expenditures for food items not produced by themselves (buying ﬁsh, for example) or other items that could alleviate the hardships of farming (such as buying a motorbike for commuting the 3–15 km between garden and village home). In families with 4–6 children (which

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is still the rule in the older generation), it is rare that more than one or two of the children get a chance to go on studying beyond primary school. Nevertheless, there has been a substantial increase of extramural educational careers since the mid 1980s. On the weekends and during school holidays these students return to the village to help their families with the gardens and rice ﬁelds which provide the major source of the family income. When conversing among themselves, they tend to use Indonesian (as they are used to when in Palu). The children of the politically leading families have only a very poor command of Dampelas, bearing witness to the fact that they grew up in an environment where Indonesian was the most commonly used language. In those families who aspire to higher education for their children it is common to use Indonesian when conversing with them. Of those students who had ﬁnished their university education by 1993, only very few had returned to the village for good, the others working in Palu or in subdistrict capitals. In short, we ﬁnd all the characteristics of the emigration scenario in progress. If the present trends are not reversed, it is highly probable that the state of Dampelas will resemble that of its close kin Dampal (Section 3.4.2.1) before too long. The situation for the three villages where Balaesang is spoken seems to be similar to the one just described for Talaga. All of these villages are almost exclusively populated by Balaesang. In Rano, the only village I actually visited, I observed the following: almost everybody in this small village (827 inhabitants according to the 1991 census) was speaking Balaesang. This was fairly easy to observe since a large part of the population crowded at night around the village’s two television sets. On ﬁrst sight, Rano gives the impression of a very vital Balaesang speech community (much more so than Talaga). However, there was a conspicuous hole in the population present at the television meetings, pertaining to the 15–30 years age bracket. Upon inquiry, it turned out that almost every family was said to have some children studying in Palu (or Makassar). Thus, although the symptoms of the emigration scenario are not yet as noticeable in Rano as they are in the town of Tolitoli or in Talaga, it seems likely that the further development proceeds along the lines characteristic of the emigration scenario. It was claimed that the situation in the other two Balaesang villages is similar to the one in Rano but that would have to be checked further before making an informed prognosis for the future of the Balaesang language. 25 3.4.2.3 VITAL, BUT LONG-TERM ENDANGERED LANGUAGES In 1993, eight of the eleven Tomini-Tolitoli languages/major dialects were spoken in apparently vital speech communities. Five of these languages, i.e. Totoli, 26 Ampibabo-Lauje, Tajio, 25

Rano differs from the other two villages, Kamonji and Ketong, in that it is not located on the coast but right in the middle of the Balaesang peninsula, on the shores of a small beautiful lake (similar to Talaga). Since ca. 1990 (when the roads became better), the lake provides a new source of income because its fresh water ﬁsh can be sold for a good price in Palu markets. 26 These Totoli live in four somewhat isolated villages ca. 80 km further east of the Totoli discussed above in the section on endangered languages.

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Boano and Tialo, are spoken by exclusively coastal populations (Boano in only one village). Most of their villages are ‘full’ in the sense that there is no space for new migrants to settle in the immediate neighbourhood of the Tomini-Tolitoli. Hence, it is unlikely that these communities will be affected by the immigration scenario as outlined above. However, in the case of the Ampibabo-Lauje and the Tajio, the larger area where these speech communities are found is heavily populated by Rai and Ledo, with the Tomini-Tolitoli villages being surrounded by Ledo/Rai villages. In the case of the Tialo, there are very large transmigration projects right ‘at the back’ of many Tialo villages, the transmigrants clearly outnumbering the Tialo. In the past, such settlement patterns did not affect language usage very much since the different communities did not interact very closely. It is not clear whether this will continue to be the case in the future when improved transportation and the introduction of telecommunication (begun in the early 1990s) will provide for new interactional patterns on the subdistrict level, a possibility eagerly awaited by the subdistrict administrations. A ﬁrst example of such new patterns are the regular subdistrict-wide soccer tournaments that have been organized in those subdistricts where the roads are good enough for regular and cheap transportation. The economic development in all of these villages is in the direction of the emigration scenario. This development will, however, be somewhat slower than in the economically stronger villages due to less fertile grounds and overproduction crises (the latter have started to occur since a few years caused by the fact that everyone plants the same cash crop(s), i.e. the ones currently sponsored by a government programme). There is also a limit to careers in administration and education. That is, if no new opportunities for wage work emerge—an item that tops the agenda of the provincial government—the possibilities for temporarily residing outside the village, which forms the core of the emigration scenario, will be rather limited. Still, the aspirations of the population in these villages seem to be very similar to those in the economically more advanced villages in which the symptoms of the emigration scenario are easily detectable. It is thus very likely that a large scale language shift will occur in those villages with vital Tomini-Tolitoli speech communities as well, if opportunities for (temporary) wage work outside the community arise. 27 The assessment of the viability of the remaining three languages is complicated by the fact that they are not spoken exclusively by coastal populations but by middle and inner hill people as well. In fact, one language, i.e. Pendau, is spoken only by middle hill people. Today, most of these people live in resettlement projects or small hamlets close to coastal villages (the Pendau language area spreads very far along the west coast (more than 150 km) which is quite surprising given the fairly small 27 One possibility I have heard being pondered in various of these villages is the possibility to seek wage work abroad, in particular in Malaysia. At least one person of the Tolitoli area is known to work as a teacher in Malaysia.

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number of speakers (ca. 3.200)). Although the Pendau seem to have been in contact with the coastal population for a very long time, they have entered into closer social relationships with speakers of another group only in a few instances. 28 Otherwise they seem to keep pretty much to themselves even if their settlements are located only a few hundred meters away from a coastal village centre. In their settlements, Pendau is very much the everyday language. I witnessed only three kinds of occasions in which Pendau use Indonesian. One concerns occasional visits paid to the nearby village (for example, on market days) and the (very infrequent) visits by other people from the village (mostly in ofﬁcial missions). Another situation concerns religious services administered by Menadonese Protestant missionaries who have been active among the Pendau in Dampelas. And, thirdly, most of the Pendau children today attend primary school where Indonesian is the language of instruction. In the future, the pressure on the Pendau to integrate more fully into the coastal village life will increase. Since the coastal population is socially dominant (and looks down on the Pendau as supposedly ‘uncivilized mountain people’), it is unlikely that the Pendau language will play a role in the linguistic ecology of the integrated communities. Note also that the traditional contact pattern between Tomini-Tolitoli groups has been for the later arrivals to learn the language of the established community. It is unclear, however, to what extent the Pendau will give way to the pressure towards further integration. Turning now to the remaining two languages, Dondo and Lauje, the comments on Dondo can be very brief. Dondo is spoken by both a coastal and a middle hill population. The situation of the coastal population is similar to the one sketched above for the Ampibabo-Lauje and Tajio coastal populations. The situation of the middle hill people—all of whom live in resettlement projects and small hamlets—is similar to the one just described for the Pendau. For both populations, there is, however, one perhaps crucial difference: most of the middle hill Dondo interact with a coastal population which is also Dondo. This set-up may lead to a reinforcement of their use of the Dondo language in a broad variety of domains. Such a reinforcement is presently observable in the Lauje area around Tinombo, an area almost exclusively populated by some 30,000 Lauje who live in all three agroecological zones (coastal, middle and inner hills). Most of the coastal villages are overcrowded and relatively poor due to the fact that in this area steep mountains project very close to the coast line, leaving only little land for rice ﬁelds and gardens. Hence, major components of both the emigration scenario and the immigration scenario 28

One example is the island of Simatang which reportedly is populated mostly by Bajau, some of whom are intermarried with Pendau. I did not visit the island myself but obtained these reports from various government ofﬁcials in Kecamatan Dampal Utara and from the people I interviewed in Bambapula, the mainland village close to Simatang. Furthermore, some Pendau seem to have intermarried with Sangirese on the Balaesang peninsula (Phil Quick, pc). See Quick (2008) for more in-depth information on the Pendau and their language.

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do not apply. Even in Tinombo, the subdistrict capital, where only about 60 per cent of the population are Lauje and strong Kaili and Gorontalo communities exist, the tendency towards language shift is not as pronounced as in other subdistrict capitals. One of the reasons for this seems to be the fact that many coastal Lauje have relatives among the middle hill Lauje and interact fairly regularly with them for personal and economic reasons. On these occasions, only Lauje is spoken since the command of Indonesian among the middle hill people is generally poor. As for the inner hill Lauje, there is simply no space for resettlement projects close to the coastal locations in the area. Attempts by the government to resettle them further south have not been successful so far. In short, the prospects for Lauje are probably the best among the Tomini-Tolitoli languages because of the demographic, geographic, and economic factors just mentioned. This, however, does not mean that they are immune to language shift. It is almost certain that all Lauje will become bilingual in Lauje and Indonesian in the near future (this is already the case for coastal Lauje). What is not so clear is whether this bilingual setting will be stable or just represents an intermediate stage in a complete shift towards Indonesian.

3.5 Conclusion The preceding sections develop and illustrate an approach to the problem of language endangerment in terms of endangerment scenarios. This approach presupposes a rather strict distinction between the symptoms of language endangerment and its causes. The notion endangerment scenario, as understood here, only applies to the potential causes of language endangerment. It is based on the assumption that there is no single factor which could be claimed to cause language endangerment. Instead, language endangerment is seen as the outcome of a complex constellation of factors which have to co-occur in order to have an impact on patterns of language use. Approaching language endangerment in terms of scenarios does not mean that no generalizations are possible with regard to its causes. However, this approach rests on the assumption that useful generalizations would not simply consist of a list of possible causes. Instead, what is required is a typology of endangerment scenarios which provides a systematization of typical constellations leading to large scale language shift in a given community. The scenario approach is also supported in Chapter 4 by Charles E. Grimes in this volume, which discusses endangerment scenarios on Buru, an island east of Sulawesi. Here as well, (forced) migrations of local populations play a major role in the loss of two languages. However, as in the case of the Tomini-Tolitoli languages, it would be misleading to claim that migration necessarily leads to language shift, as shown by the fact the some other varieties on Buru survived the forced migrations under Dutch colonial rule.

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Comparison with the Buru cases nicely illustrates the need for detailed and ﬁned-grained descriptions of endangerment scenarios in order to arrive at a useful and comprehensive typology of such scenarios. While many details in the overall scenarios in northern Central Sulawesi and on Buru are strikingly similar, others diverge quite clearly. To mention just two examples of divergence, some of the Buru cases involve the migrations of whole speech communities rather than subgroups or individuals, and the migrations in Buru were forcibly brought about by a colonial power rather than by individual economic aspirations and motivations. From the point of view of a typology of endangerment scenarios, the question involved in such comparisons is which differences actually matter and which don’t. Thus, one may well question whether the distinction between forced and so-called voluntary migrations is relevant in this regard. Migrations which are organized and enforced by government agencies are often put in opposition to ‘voluntary’ migrations which seem to be initiated by the migrants themselves and do not involve the visible application of force. However, more often than not such ‘voluntary’ migrations are caused by difﬁcult living conditions and they are in some sense also ‘forced’ by these conditions. Although there may be different kinds of forces at work here, I do not think that a distinction between forced and ‘voluntary’ migrations along these lines is an important or useful one in researching language endangerment. 29 Instead, comparison of the Sulawesi and Buru scenarios clearly shows the crucial importance of other factors interacting with the migratory movements in bringing about language shift in a speciﬁc situation. Thus, for example, in the Buru cases one important factor contributing to language death is the fact that the original homeland of a given group is no longer populated by a segment of the displaced speech community. And, as detailed in section 3.4.1 above, in the Tomini-Tolitoli migration scenarios, settlement patterns on the dusun level are important in providing a ‘fertile’ environment for changing traditional usage patterns. This brings us back to the issue of ‘deeper’ causes of language endangerment already raised at the end of section 3.4.1.3. Continuing the argument from the preceding paragraph, one could easily argue that so-called ‘forced’ migrations are of course also based on economic motives and power constellations (the forced displacement of speech communities on Buru was part of the Dutch strategy to win full control of the area in order to be able to exploit its natural resources, in particular its famous spices). Hence, one could claim that at the root of all migrations and any other similarly ‘superﬁcial’ factors inﬂuencing language use in a given community are economic interests and power constellations. While the basic role of economic forces clearly is of central importance, they are not sufﬁcient to account for the manifold and highly varied conﬁgurations of language 29 A different kind of migration may be involved in imperialist expansions, a topic beyond the scope of the present contribution.

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shift occurring throughout the world’s speech communities. In order to understand how economic forces inﬂuence and shape linguistic usage patterns, one has to look at a largish collection of factors, including demography, settlement patterns, marriage preferences, etc, and their interaction. Only some constellations of these factors lead to community-wide language shift, others not. And it is this aspect of language endangerment that the notion of an endangerment scenario is intended to capture and represent.

4 Digging for the Roots of Language Death in Eastern Indonesia: The Cases of Kayeli and Hukumina Charles E. Grimes

4.1 Introduction In the Indonesian province of Maluku where the population is roughly 50 per cent Muslim and 50 per cent Christian, people often make distinctions along religious lines in explaining their view of language ecology. In Christian communities, they assert, people no longer speak their vernacular languages and have shifted to Ambonese Malay. 1 In Muslim communities, on the other hand, they assert that people have retained their vernacular languages and speak Ambonese Malay as a second language. While this largely characterizes villages around the provincial capital on the small island of Ambon, religious afﬁliation per se has not been the determining factor in language maintenance or shift in central Maluku. One has only to look at the nearby island of Buru to ﬁnd the opposite dynamics—there some Muslim communities have shifted to Malay, while traditional and Christian communities continue to use the vernacular language vigorously (See also Florey 2005c, Florey and Ewing in press: 5–6, Musgrave and Ewing 2006). In this chapter I focus on two relatively recent cases of language shift and death among Muslim communities on the island of Buru, looking at a variety of relevant historical, cultural and social factors. On the basis of the understanding gained from these Buru cases, I then discuss several other endangered languages and cases of

1 Ambonese Malay is a regional variety distinct from the standard Malay known as Indonesian (see Collins 1980, C. Grimes 1985, 1996, B. D. C. Grimes 1991, van Minde 1997). An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 69th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Organized session: Field reports/Endangered languages, organized by Ken Hale and Tony Woodbury, New Orleans, 5–8 January 1995, and then archived as C. Grimes (1995b). I am indebted to Barbara Dix Grimes for her comments.

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language shift in both Muslim and Christian communities on other islands in the region. My research on the functionally extinct languages of Kayeli and Hukumina has been part of my involvement in the Buru Language Project, a project focusing primarily on the vernacular language of 45,000 native inhabitants on the island (called the Buru language), but also including other languages found on the island such as Kayeli, Hukumina, and languages with which these are in contact, such as Ambelau, Ambonese Malay, Buton, Indonesian, Sula, and Tukang Besi. 2 During ﬁeldwork in 1989 I visited the Kayeli area hoping to put the Buru language and culture in its larger context with solid linguistic and cultural data from Kayeli. An earlier attempt at taking a Kayeli wordlist in 1983 in Namlea (across the bay from Kayeli) had proved frustrating, and that data was unreliable. Although recent literature (Wurm and Hattori 1983) had indicated there were 1,000 speakers of Kayeli, in 1989 it took half a day to ﬁnd four speakers in three villages with the help of the raja of Kayeli. No one in Kayeli could think of anyone else still alive who spoke the Kayeli language. Over a three day period of meeting with these four people (two men and two women—all of whom were over sixty years old), they themselves came to several realizations. First, they realized that none of them had used the language actively for over thirty years. Second, as I tried to elicit basic vocabulary there was a growing horror as they came to realize what one of them ﬁnally verbalized on the second day: ‘If the four of us cannot remember these words, then they are lost forever.’ Third, they also began to realize that the discourse of past glory which had brought identity and cohesion to them as an ethnic group was built on a now crumbled foundation—while the number of people who could trace their ethnic origins to Kayeli kin groups was about 800, they had not maintained their language which symbolized and preserved their unique ethnic identity. It had been lost, not by conscious choice, but by simple neglect. As I was getting on a boat to leave, the raja of Kayeli (who had been present at all sessions), asked me, ‘With the words that you gathered, could you please put together a book that we can use in school to teach our children how to speak our language again?’ Not only were these realizations traumatic for them, but also for me as I struggled with having been the instrument that triggered them, albeit unintentionally. On the earlier survey trip to the north coast of Buru in 1983, I had gathered data from the last speaker of Leliali in the village of Jiku Merasa (Plate 1). That data and the data from Kayeli were sufﬁcient to establish Leliali as a divergent dialect of Kayeli. 2 The Buru Language Project was initiated by the raja of south Buru, Bapa Raja Anton Lesnussa (now deceased), in March 1982 when he travelled to the distant city of Ujung Pandang on the island of Sulawesi and made contact with the SIL administration there, speciﬁcally requesting assistance with Bible translation and vernacular literacy materials, particularly for the mountain peoples of Buru. At the time he was not particularly interested in documenting the Buru language and culture, nor those of other communities on the island, but he did recognize that outside investigators would need to study them in order to help with what he wanted.

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Upon visiting Jiku Merasa again in late 1989, I learned that the gentleman had died the previous March. No other speakers were known by the community. During my three days in Kayeli in 1989 I was also introduced to a toothless old woman around 80 years old who claimed to speak Hukumina, also known locally as ‘Bambaa’. She had married a Hukumina speaker, but to her knowledge neither she nor anyone else had used the language since the Second World War. Her mind wandered regularly, and the little data I was able to collect from her are a mixture of Kayeli, Buru, and some other language that I assume is Hukumina. There are no other known speakers.

4.2 Buru Language Geography Overview Figure 4.1 summarizes what is currently known about languages on Buru. It is based on direct linguistic evidence as well as on indirect evidence such as written historical records, local oral history, and place names (adapted from C. Grimes 1995b, 2000). Upper case represents language names, lower case letters represent dialect names, and italics represent subdialects. Alternate names and alternate spellings are in parentheses. Li Garan is a special taboo register spoken by speakers of the Rana subdialect (see Grimes and Maryott 1994). The maps show the current dialect picture of the Buru language and patterns of immigrant settlements on Buru. Of the ﬁve major dialects, Masarete, Rana, and Wae Sama continue to be used as the primary means of daily communication, while speakers of Fogi and Lisela are well along the shift to Malay. The shift in Fogi may be complete. The remaining speakers of Lisela use the language sporadically in very limited domains (e.g. in traditional marriage negotiations, or as a patchy insider language around outsiders). Neither Fogi nor Lisela are used for regular verbal interactions with the younger generation. So these two dialects should be considered moribund (see Himmelmann, this volume, for a fuller description of the term). Approximately 12,500 Sula speakers inhabit the north coast of Buru and according to their own oral history have done so for ten to fourteen generations. They maintain their language and maintain ties with their homeland on islands to the north. On the west and south coasts there are also 13,000 people who claim to be from ‘Buton’ a cover term for a group of islands off of Southeast Sulawesi. They claim to have been there for approximately twelve generations. They maintain their various languages and are in continual contact with their homelands. With so many immigrants on the north coast, speakers of the Lisela dialect of Buru are a minority on their own traditional land. This ﬁts Himmelmann’s description of an immigration scenario (this volume).

76 BURU

Charles E. Grimes (45,000 speakers) Masarete Wae Sama Rana

–strong –strong –strong Rana [Li Garan] Wae Geren (upper) Wae Kabo Wae Tina

Lisela (Li Enyorot)

moribund– shifting to Malay Lisela (Licella) Tagalisa Wae Geren (lower) Leliali (Liliali) Kayeli (Wae Apo, Unit-unit, Mako)

Fogi (Li Emteban)

moribund– mostly shifted to Malay Fogi (Vogi, Bobo) Tomahu

–extinct

HUKUMINA (Bambaa) Bara Hukumina Palumata (Palamata, Balamata, Pala Mada)

–extinct –1 speaker in 1989 –extinct

KAYELI (Cajeli, Gaeli) Leliali (Liliali, Marulat) Kayeli Moksela (Maksela, Opselan) Ilat Lumaete (Lumaiti, Lumaite, Lumara) Figure 4.1 Speech communities on Buru Island

–extinct (as of March 1989) –4 speakers in 1989 –extinct (1974) –extinct –extinct

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Map 4.1 Major dialects of the Buru language (1989)

Map 4.2 Immigrant settlements on Buru (1989)

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4.3 Linguistic Diversity Buru, Kayeli and Hukumina are sufﬁciently diverse to be considered separate languages rather than dialects of a single language. This is evidenced in their distinct historical sound correspondences, in their grammatical constructions, and in their vocabularies. Linguistic details are presented in C. Grimes (1995b). The claims are preliminary since the data and reliability vary greatly for each of the three languages. The Buru data are based on 24 months of residence in the language area which have resulted, among other things, in a growing dictionary (over 5,400 headwords), a corpus of over 200 texts (114 fully interlinearized), a reference grammar (C. Grimes 1991a), an ethnography (B. D. Grimes 1990, 1993), a paper on contact issues (B. D. Grimes 1994b), and a paper on comparative morphology (C. Grimes 1991c). From the Kayeli data, I am compiling a dictionary that at the time of writing has just over 428 processed headwords (C. Grimes 1994–ms), and additional ﬁeld notes based on the three days of ﬁeldwork. For Hukumina I was able to obtain very little reliable data from the one old woman during the span of the ﬁeldwork focusing on Kayeli. Consequently, data for the three languages cannot be evaluated on an equal footing. All three languages are typologically SVO, prepositional, adjectivals follow the head noun, genitive comes before the head noun. They are predominantly head-marking languages (see Nichols 1986). From the limited data available there are also some notable differences, such as in the genitive enclitics, the possessive constructions, inﬂection of vowel-initial verbs, and the use of an applicative. Table 4.1 gives an indication of some of the lexical differences between the three languages.

Table 4.1 Examples of lexical differences between Buru, Kayeli, and Hukumina Gloss

Buru

Kayeli

Hukumina

hand, arm mouth foot, leg head betelpepper jungle sleep sleepy sick, painful return (home) no, not hungry sit

fahan ﬁﬁn kadan olon dalu mua bage duba empei oli moo eglada defo

limani nuan bitiñ oloni gamal boot ine

rima mpidu– eñaik fatun elut gulalin etnono lastoton boto bihin mbaa spala egnabon

berere wae nanibar stea

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4.4 Historical Events Relevant to Language Ecology on Buru While located in the region called the Spice Islands, Buru was historically on the periphery of the spice trade and its associated power struggles. Cloves (Eugenia caryophyllata) are native to Ternate and the islands off the west coast of Halmahera. Nutmeg and mace (Myristica fragrans) are native to the Banda Islands 300 km eastsoutheast of Buru. Two main trade routes developed from peninsular Southeast Asia to the source of the spices both before and after European contact (which began in 1511). 3 One route went along the north coasts of Borneo and Sulawesi to Ternate. The second went along Sumatra, Java, Flores, Timor, and cut up to Ambon (see Villiers 1981, van Fraassen 1983, 1987). Both of these routes missed Buru. The link between Ternate and Ambon likewise bypassed Buru (see Map 4.3). Although leaders at Ternate initially welcomed the Portuguese as trading partners in 1512, numerous tensions soon developed in the region. The exclusive trading rights of the Portuguese were contested by traders from Southeast Asia who had prior trading arrangements in the region. In addition, religious conﬂicts arose between Islam and the newly arrived Christianity brought by the Portuguese. With the wealth derived from the spice trade and the inﬂuence of Islam, Ternatan society developed into a sultanate, with power and authority allocated to a single individual (the Sultan) rather than with the traditional group of elders who made decisions by consensus. Buru came to be considered a dependency of Ternate, with the Sultan’s ‘governors’ on Buru eventually appointing four local men as Matgugul 4 with the responsibility of extracting tribute (enati lit. ‘that which is set down’) from the populace on behalf of the Sultan. When the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie [VOC, The Dutch East India Trading Company] succeeded in taking over the Portuguese fort on Ambon in 1605, their primary goal was to establish a monopoly in the spice trade. They soon engaged in a series of military actions to bring various areas under their control. The demise of the Ternatan power structure through the ‘Hoamoal wars’ on Seram and the escalation of Dutch power, which also set in motion massive social and linguistic upheaval on Buru, is described by van Fraassen (1983:17): The war ignited by the 1651 rebellion [against the Dutch] continued until 1656. The rebels received Macassarese support, and the war was in no way restricted to Hoamoal [west Seram]. Arnold de Vlamingh van Oudtshoorn, the Dutch commander-in-chief in this war, was also launching attacks on the VOC’s opponents elsewhere, among other places in Buru and east Seram. . . . The Ambonese region was formally removed from Ternatan control and the institution of the Ternatan governorship was abolished. Hoamoal . . . was completely depopulated. . . . The chiefs of Hoamoal had a place of residence assigned to 3 At the height of the early spice trade, one of the main centres was Malaka (known in the earlier literature as ‘Malacca’, founded in 1401), in the straits between Sumatra and peninsular Malaysia. 4 Gugul is a Ternate loan associated with the position of a ruler (Andaya 1990).

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Map 4.3 Indonesia showing Maluku and central Maluku (reproduced with permission from Florey and Ewing forthcoming)

them in Batu Merah, in the vicinity of the VOC’s chief fortress in Ambon. The population of the islands of Boano, Kelang and Ambelau was transferred to the island of Manipa, where the Company had a small fort. All the Muslim chiefs of the coastal areas of Buru were obliged to settle in the neighbourhood of the Company’s fort at Kayeli. . . . The evacuated areas were systematically destroyed and rendered unﬁt for reoccupation. Contracts were concluded with the chiefs of Buru and north and east Seram in which the latter conceded themselves to be subordinate to the VOC; promised to entertain no relations with other nations or rulers, to keep out all Macassarese, Malays, and Javanese. [Emphasis mine]

While those living in the interior were not as affected by Ternate’s struggle with Europeans over the spice trade as those on the coast, the situation did have a signiﬁcant

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Map 4.4 Villages from which the Dutch relocated populations

effect on language use on the island. Twelve coastal communities were forced to live around the Dutch fort at Kayeli on the southern shore of Namlea Bay. The Dutch gathered twelve hostage-puppets around them at the fort at Kayeli. The leaders of these communities are still referred to in Kayeli as the ‘twelve Raja Patti’ or the ‘twelve Latu Patti’ (‘twelve king-leaders’). Each raja or latu set up his own village, his own mosque, his own wells, etc., for a community of people from his own area speaking whatever variety of speech was distinct to their area. 5 Six of these mosquevillages were clustered west of the Kayeli river, including Kayeli, Lisela, Tagalisa, Marulat, Leliali, Ilat, and Bara (Fogi). Five others were clustered on the east side of the Lumaiti river two kilometres away, including Masarete, Hukumina, Lumaiti, Tomahu, and Palamata, with Waisama to the south. The Dutch fort was in the middle, between the two rivers along with a Kampung Cina (Chinese Village) and a village called Kayeli Kristen (Christian Kayeli). In 1847 the population of the communities around the Kayeli fort was around 2,000. At that time a government ofﬁcial (Willer 1858:138) listed these same villages, showing that the situation had changed little for 200 years. During these 200 years Kayeli remained the focal point of Dutch involvement on Buru. However, as the Dutch administrators recorded, there was very little proﬁt to 5 Willer (1858:138) lists Ternate and Malay titles for the ‘chiefs’ clustered around the fort at Kayeli, including a sengaji (probably a Ternatan term) for Lumaete; raja (Sanskrit ‘king’ used for local rulers in central Maluku) for Kayeli, Lisela, Tagalisa, and Leliali; patti (central and eastern central Maluku term for ‘local ruler’) for Marulat, Hukumina, and Fogi; orang kaya (Malay ‘rich man’) for Wae Sama, Palamata, and Masarete; and an orang tua (Malay ‘parent, elder’) for Tomahu.

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be made from Buru. Following their practices established elsewhere, the Dutch saw each raja at Kayeli as king (Dutch regent) over a large territory surrounding his home village. Thus, the Dutch saw their own control as extending to all of Buru through the rajas at Kayeli. B. D. Grimes (1994a) describes a signiﬁcantly different view of the role of the rajas from within Buru culture itself. In accord with the precedence established by the Sultan of Ternate, the Muslim rajas continued to extract tribute and services from the people living in their territory—a practice they legitimated from the perceived superiority of Islam over the heathen (referred to by the Dutch as Alfuru or Alifuru) people in the interior of Buru. The tribute and services were important for the rajas as they proﬁted from servicing ships stopping at Kayeli as a port of call to replenish water, ﬁrewood and other supplies. In 1845–6 one Spanish, three American, one Balinese, and eight English ships are recorded as stopping in Kayeli (Willer 1858:209). During the second half of the 1800s the greater fort community at Kayeli began to decline for a variety of reasons. The Dutch ofﬁcials became concerned by what they perceived as an abuse of power by the rajas over the interior people of Buru. B. D. Grimes (1993:37) describes the ensuing decay: As the colonial government weakened the authority of the raja, Kayeli began to decline. Perhaps not unrelated was the fact that Kayeli was one of the few places the Dutch allowed the sale of opium. The unproductiveness of several opium-smoking rajas was noted by Forbes (1885:392). Furthermore, in the 1880s the rajas of Leliali, Wae Sama, and Fogi, along with most of their people, returned to their original homeland after more than 200 years at the fort. Around the turn of the century the rajas of Lisela and Tagalisa did the same. Also by the turn of the century the villages of Maroelat and Bara were extinct, and the ruling families of Hukumina, Tomahu and Lumaiti had died out. In 1907 there were only 231 Moslems at Kayeli, compared to 1400 ﬁfty years earlier. (van der Miesen 1908:836, 837)

In addition, a smallpox epidemic swept the area during the latter part of the 1800s, severely reducing the population around the fort. And in the early twentieth century the Dutch colonial government, the Chinese, and the Christian village moved out of the malarial swamp at Kayeli to a dry area across the bay which became the presentday government centre of Namlea. By the time of a detailed Dutch map in 1915, the two groupings of six villages had consolidated into just two villages—Masarete and Kayeli. 6 Thus, from the mid 1600s until early in the 1900s, the focus of Dutch contact on Buru was concentrated around the fort at Kayeli. The community surrounding 6

In 1989 the village of Kayeli was using the Lisela mosque (the Kayeli mosque being in ruins) and the locations of the former villages of Tagalisa and Fogi were still known. The village of Masarete stands seaward from the site of the former village of Hukumina whose foundations are still to be found hidden underwater in a nearby sago swamp. Some remnants of the inhabitants of the extinct villages are still identiﬁable by their kin group afﬁliations. And some of the older people still remember bits and pieces of the different speech varieties as either ﬁrst language or second language speakers.

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the fort was a complex microcosm of the twelve Muslim communities with their associated speech varieties, plus mercenaries and government ofﬁcials from Ambon, Seram, and other parts of the archipelago. 7 While the Kayeli people continued to use the Kayeli language for things associated with their own cultural and political domains, the language of this multiethnic multilingual community around the fort eventually became Malay. 8 It was from this community around the Dutch fort at Kayeli that most of the wordlists labeled ‘Buru’ were collected during this period. This serves as a partial explanation for the utter confusion and language mixing found in most of those wordlists.

4.5 Cultural Notions of Power and Place In returning to their homelands after more than 200 years at the Dutch fort, the ﬁve rajas and their communities exempliﬁed important cultural notions about power and place. Societies of eastern Indonesia are organized around kin groups which can also be aptly described as ‘origin groups’. Fox (1990:3) has characterized such groups in eastern Indonesia as follows: What they claim to share and to celebrate is some form of common derivation. This derivation is socially constructed and may be variously based on the acknowledgment of a common ancestor, a common cult, a common name or set of names, a common place of derivation, and/or a share in a common collection of sacred artifacts.

On Buru there are around forty such kin groups referred to locally as noro. The noro to which an individual belongs establishes his or her ancestors and place of ancestral origins. This territory may be around the headwaters of the stream at which their mythical founding ancestor ﬁrst appeared, or the place where an immigrating founding ancestor ﬁrst disembarked from the boat that brought them to the island. Noro members are inalienably tied to this place as traditional custodians, even though they may not live there. It is thus important not only on Buru, but also in many societies in eastern Indonesia, to distinguish between place of residence and place of origin. Schut (1921) and B. D. Grimes (1996, 1997, 2006) discuss in greater depth the social constructions of origin, identity, place, and power tied to place on Buru. In times of difﬁculty Buru people who reside outside their place of origin return there to restore or ensure a proper state of affairs in their relationship with the founding ancestor as well as with other relatives, living and dead. This includes people who have lived their entire lives on the coast or even on another island several thousand kilometres away. This dynamic is also true across generations with younger people 7

Such origins are evident in the names listed in Willer (1858) and Wilken (1875). By this period the Malay spoken in the region had already acquired a distinct regional ﬂavour and was signiﬁcantly different from the classical Malay associated with the Sultanates of Riau and Johore on peninsular Malaysia (see B. D. Grimes, 1991, van Minde, 1997). It was this regional variety of Malay, not classical Malay that was the source of lexical borrowings from Malay. 8

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returning to the place of origin that their parents or grandparents left that the younger generation may never have visited in order to resolve difﬁculties they cannot otherwise overcome. In 1991 to resolve difﬁcult relations they were experiencing with another kin group, one entire kin group who had lived in the centre of the island for several generations abandoned their village and ﬁelds there and migrated four days’ walk to the coast to return to the place at which their founding ancestor had ﬁrst set foot on Buru. Buru people acknowledge ties to their ancestors regardless of where they are, but the relationship is most efﬁcacious in the place of origin of their kin group (see B. D. Grimes 1993). The phenomenon of returning to one’s place of origin to resolve difﬁculties has also been observed for other societies in the region and is not limited to isolated societies. For example, Cooley (1961) observed that Ambonese Christians will travel several thousand kilometres home to participate in Good Friday communion when trying to overcome a particularly slippery and far-reaching problem. 9 The importance of place and origin groups in social life can also be a factor in language ecology. Valeri (1994) has noted how the small (around 150 people) Huaulu society of north central Seram is a multilingual society with people using the lingua franca and other languages to interact with surrounding groups. Knowledge expressed in these languages is important, but the most important and powerful knowledge deﬁning Huaulu society and ancestral origins is always expressed in the Huaulu language.

4.6 Language Obsolescence on Buru Island 4.6.1 The demise of the Kayeli language The demise of the Kayeli language has involved people of Kayeli kin groups living in their place of origin who have gradually stopped using the Kayeli language. Yet after the events of 1656 the Kayeli people no longer formed an autonomous society, but were merely one of the twelve Muslim villages in the multiethnic multilingual community surrounding the Dutch fort. Many activities at Kayeli were externally oriented and necessitated the growing use of Malay, the local lingua franca. To deal with the inhabitants of the interior the raja of Kayeli had an interpreter who could use the Buru language. To deal with the Ternatans, Javanese, Makassarese, Ambonese, and Dutch, they used Malay. And to interact with those populations that were resettled around their village they also had to resort to Malay. It was apparently only for internal functions (e.g. home, some marriage negotiations, disputes with other Kayeli litigants) that the Kayeli language was used. They were not even remotely an internally cohesive community, but were to a great degree integrated into a larger pluralistic community. 9

My own years of residence on Ambon conﬁrm that this practice still exists.

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When the Kayeli fort community began to decline, the semi-independent communities that remained were forced to consolidate to some degree. There was no longer sufﬁcient personnel to maintain the twelve mosques independently and some of these were abandoned to consolidate and maintain a few at acceptable standards. At the turn of the century when the Dutch colonial government moved their ofﬁces across the bay to Namlea, the twelve Muslim villages had consolidated into just two. Furthermore the smallpox, subsequent deaths, and eventual move by the Dutch conspired to communicate to the other populations that the Kayeli raja and leaders no longer had access to the power of the place that brings success. The Second World War brought renewed activity to the area, but the Japanese established themselves in Namlea, not in Kayeli. After independence the Indonesian government did the same. The discourse of past glory and positions such as the raja’s ofﬁcial translators were maintained, but the substance behind them no longer existed. Most commoners survived by becoming ﬁsherman or as swidden agriculturalists and intermarried from the pool of those left in the two villages of Kayeli and Masarete, rather than maintaining their distinct ethnic identities. So while at the local level, use of the Kayeli language in a few domains and contrast with the other ethnolinguistic groups was sufﬁcient to maintain the language to some degree from 1656 until the Second World War, the events set in motion in 1656 and the lack of an autonomous community conspired to allow a shift to Malay in the twentieth century that went virtually unnoticed by the community themselves. 4.6.2 The death of the Hukumina people and language Willer (1858) notes that homeland areas of Hukumina, Palamata, Tomahu, and Bara had no interior people from which to extract tribute, and thus the leaders around the fort at Kayeli were not able to be economically independent. And van der Miesen (1908) observed that the ruling family of Hukumina had died out by the turn of the century. They were a numerically and economically impoverished people severed from their place of origin, and thus having no access to power. After these events the use of Hukumina rapidly declined—survival for those left was to be found in using Malay. It appears there were three signiﬁcant languages on Buru Island prior to 1650. Each language had multiple dialects as reconstructed from the written historical record, from available data, from historical sounds correspondences, from place names, and from local oral history (summarized in Figure 4.1). Currently only the Buru language survives. 4.6.3 Similar situations elsewhere in central Maluku A number of situations elsewhere in central Maluku parallel the dynamics of displacement and amalgamation found in the Kayeli and Hukumina cases. As a result of the Hoamoal Wars (1651–6) the ‘chiefs’ from several communities on the Hoamoal peninsula of western Seram were resettled around the Dutch fort at Batu

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Map 4.5 Probable linguistic picture prior to 1650

Merah in Ambon Bay. The area around the fort became, like Kayeli, a multiethnic, multilingual community. Unlike the Kayeli situation there does not appear to have been a local ‘master’ of the land to establish asymmetric relationships among the relocated populations. Malay was also the language of intergroup communication. Like Hukumina, these groups were removed from their places of origin, were not able to maintain a cohesive or reasonably autonomous community, and eventually (some in the twentieth century) completed the shift to Malay. Along the west coast of Ambon Island a vernacular language is spoken in the villages of Larike, Wakasihu, and Allang. The Muslim inhabitants of Larike speak this vernacular language with relative vigor, while the Christian population functions more comfortably in Malay (Wyn Laidig, personal communication). The historical record shows that the Christian population was transported from the Hoamoal peninsula on Seram after the Hoamoal Wars to the small Dutch outpost at Larike. Like Hukumina, they were removed from their place of origin. Here the resettled population had the additional dynamic of being relocated within a community of a different dominant religion. Apparently unable to maintain their own identity they assimilated into the greater coastal Malay community of the region. See also Florey (2005c), Florey and Ewing (in press), and Musgrave and Ewing (2006) regarding Ewing’s more recent research in this area. On Buru Island itself, the interior population was essentially untouched by the effects of the Hoamoal Wars and the community at Kayeli. But two situations warrant comment. First, speakers of the Lisela dialect inhabit the northern coastal plain in an area completely dominated by outsiders. Numerically they are an ethnic minority on their own traditional land. While they have not been removed from their

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places of origin, they have been marginalized by outsiders and have assimilated with other minorities to the greater Malay coastal culture with fewer and fewer of them proﬁcient in speaking Lisela in many speech domains. Unlike Larike, however, both the Lisela people and their Sula and Buton neighbours, who are outsiders, adhere to Islam. In the Masarete dialect of Buru it is helpful to distinguish between the mountain and coastal communities. The mountain communities continue to use their language as the primarily means of daily communication. The coastal communities, however, have the added domains of education, government, religion, Chinese and Butonese merchants, as well as neighbouring communities of non-Buru people with whom they interact. The languages appropriate to these situations are Indonesian and Ambonese Malay and the coastal communities are relatively bilingual. Some coastal speakers of the Masarete dialect have speech domains in which they are more comfortable in Malay than in Buru. However, immigrants from other islands who are in a minority in a given community also learn the Buru language to survive on the coast. These coastal speakers of the Masarete dialect are on the periphery of Buru society, being removed from the interior places of origin seen as the inside (see B. D. Grimes 1994a). The use of the Alune language spoken in west Seram reﬂects similarities to the Masarete case above. Alune is spoken in approximately 25 villages scattered through the mountains and surrounding coast. To simplify a complex situation, recent research (Florey 1990, 1991, 1993, 2001a; Yushin and Takako Taguchi, personal communication) indicates that language use in the mountain communities continues to be vigorous. However, in communities on the coastal periphery, some of which have migrated from the mountains within the last 150 years (most within the last forty-ﬁve), there are many of mixed ethnic composition and uncertain relationships to the land around them. In these peripheral communities there is also a much more varied range and context of usage of Alune and Ambonese Malay, with some segments of society more comfortable in Malay. Prior to the Hoamoal Wars, in 1621 the infamous Jan Pieterszoon Coen decimated thousands of inhabitants of the Banda Islands to gain control of the monopoly in nutmeg and mace. Survivors ﬂed to the southeast and established the communities of Banda-Eli and Banda-Elat in the Kei Islands. While Malay is used heavily in these villages, the Banda language continues to be used by some (see also Loth, 1995; Collins and Kaartinen 1998; Collins 2003b). The two villages have been able to maintain a cohesive and autonomous enough ethnolinguistic identity to have not lost their language over more than 300 years.

4.7 Conclusions and Implications Recent research (B. F. Grimes, 2000) lists 726 living languages spoken in the Republic of Indonesia. Language groups located in western Indonesia (e.g. Java, Sumatra, Bali)

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number in millions of speakers, while in eastern Indonesia a greater linguistic diversity is also associated with fewer numbers of speakers for each language (see also Florey 2005a; J. Grimes 1986 and 1995 discuss the implications of size for language endangerment). People from these smaller language groups, by themselves, often do not have the economic and political resources to maintain and legitimate their own language as part of modern Indonesian social life. The examples in this paper from central Maluku show that when cases of language obsolescence and language shift occur in the region, there is not a simple or all-encompassing cause. Factors such as religious afﬁliation, language contact, migration or population size are not in themselves sufﬁcient to account for all of the cases in the region. Each case must be studied on its own to unravel the complex of interrelated factors involved in the history of each society. No single factor is diagnostic of language death. There are, however, certain factors that provide useful starting points when looking at endangered language situations in eastern Indonesia. Small language groups are not necessarily endangered, but when communities have been uprooted from their place of origin (voluntarily or by force), it becomes important to investigate whether the entire population was uprooted (e.g. Hukumina, Larike Christians, the Batu Merah community), or if part of the group was able to remain in its homeland (e.g. Lisela, Masarete, Alune). Smaller language groups in which the entire population has been severed from their places of origin appear more likely to be endangered. If there is a large language group in which some people remain in the places of origin and some migrate out or are on the periphery in prolonged interethnic contact (e.g. Masarete, Alune), those on the outside or the periphery are more likely to be involved in language shift. From another perspective, initial contact with a larger language on its periphery may bear little resemblance to the proﬁle of language use for the society as a whole. While some speakers living out of the traditional areas may shift to another language (Himmelmann’s emmigration scenario, this volume), if people continue to use the language in their place of origins the language may not be endangered. If a small language group is inundated by outsiders at its place of origins and unable to maintain its autonomy as a language and society, there is also a likelihood of language shift (e.g. Kayeli). The Funai dialect of Helong on southwest Timor Island would be another case in point (C. Grimes et al. 1997:42; Grimes and Cameron 2002). This is Himmelmann’s immigration scenario (this volume). When an entire language group is removed from its places of origin or when the language group is relatively small and involved in intense outside contact, a key question can be asked: ‘Are members of the language group able to maintain a cohesive identity as a relatively autonomous ethnolinguistic society (e.g. Banda), or must they assimilate to a larger community for survival (e.g. Hukumina, Kayeli)?’

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In the cases of both Kayeli and Hukumina the factors that set the stage for eventual language shift or obsolescence were several centuries removed from the actual period of recognizable shift. Each language has a history that may be complex and require detailed study. Reversing language shift or fostering language maintenance requires a long view of the past and perhaps a long view of the future to address the dynamics that have been set in place over centuries.

5 Maintaining Vera in Rongga: Struggles over Culture, Tradition, and Language in Modern Manggarai, Flores, Indonesia I Wayan Arka

5.1 Introduction Rongga is one of the Austronesian languages clustered along the border between Manggarai and Ngadha in Flores, Indonesia (Map 5.1). It is spoken by around 5,000 speakers in three villages in the southern part of the East Manggarai Regency. Rongga is not included in Wurm and Hattori (1981), or in Blust’s (1993) Central-Malayo Polynesian (CMP) sub-grouping, or in Fernandes’ (1996) Flores language sub-grouping. Prior to work done by Antonius et al. (1997) and publications resulting from the Rongga Documentation Project (Arka 2005; Arka 2006; Arka 2007a; Arka, Kosmas, and Suparsa 2007; Arka, Seda, Gelang, Nani, and Ture 2007; Arka and Ture 2007), Rongga was largely unknown (even by some Manggaraians) because it was considered to be part of the Manggarai language. Recent research suggests that Rongga is a language that is more afﬁliated with Ngadha than Manggarai (Antonius, Semiun, Robot, and Margarita 1997; Arka 2005), and is genetically within the CMP (Grimes, Therik, Grimes, and Jacob 1997; SIL International 2001). Like other Flores languages, Rongga is typologically isolating (Arka et al. 2007a). The (socio)linguistic situation in Flores reﬂects a complex network of dialect chains with boundaries between languages that are often difﬁcult to draw. (Map 5.1 reﬂects Research ﬁndings reported in this chapter are part of the Rongga documentation project funded by the Hans Rausing ELDP grant, SOAS, London, granted to the author (IPF0011), 2004–2006. I thank Rongga people, in particular Juventus Rau, Fransiscus Seda, Bapak Anton Gelang, and Yohanes Nani, for their generosity and hospitality during my ﬁeldwork in Flores. Special thanks must also go to Margaret Florey for who has read the earlier version of this chapter thoroughly and given me detailed and useful comments.

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Map 5.1 The Languages of Flores Island

our current understanding of the linguistic situation on the island, and more research is certainly needed.) The dialectal differentiation is associated with the relatively complex nature of the state structures and ritual polities with a variety of status systems that have existed in the region over a considerable period of time (Fox 1998:2). These have all inﬂuenced the development of the local languages. As a result, one particular dialect has been elevated to become a dialect of higher status, which therefore tends to be used over a wider area than where it was originally or regularly spoken. In western Flores, the central Manggarai dialect of Ruteng, the capital town of the regency, has gained wider intelligibility and elevated status as a regional lingua franca in west Flores, due to the inﬂuence of the Catholic mission and the advanced training schools centred in Ruteng. This dialect of Manggarai is the one taught at primary schools in Manggarai, including in the East Manggarai Regency where the Rongga people live. Indonesian is, however, certainly the most prestigious and the most commonly used language of wider communication, both regionally and nationally. For many people of Flores in general, acquiring Indonesian is a real need as they have to communicate with outsiders for their daily needs: many of the government ofﬁcials, doctors, lawyers, solicitors, teachers, and merchants or traders are non-Florenese people. The majority of the Florenese are Catholics, and Indonesian is also the language used in church as the priest is generally a non-local person. Most Florenese are now bilinguals speaking their own indigenous language and Indonesian. Most of the Rongga people are multilinguals, speaking at least four languages (Indonesian, Manggarai, one or more neighbouring language(s) of Manus or Waerana, and Rongga).

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There has been much cultural change, especially for the Rongga people, in the last three decades. However, it might have started much earlier with the spread of Catholicism to Flores in the early twentieth century. The ﬁrst recorded baptism was that of ﬁve Manggaraians in Reo (northern Manggarai) in 1912. Catholicism then spread southward and reached southern areas of Manggarai in 1950s with the establishment of the Paroki (Parish) Waerana and the Catholic Seminary in the Rongga area of Kisol in 1955 (Daem Pr. 1992). The introduction of modern religion has had a devaluing effect on the local indigenous belief and knowledge (further discussed in relation to Vera below). However, recent rapid development and modernization, especially during Soeharto’s era (starting in late 1960s), has also imposed heavy pressure on Rongga language and culture, resulting in accelerated unprecedented marginalization and imminent loss of certain traditional genres. In this chapter I report the shrinking of linguistic and cultural resources in Rongga based on ﬁeld experiences in Flores (2004–6). I examine the transmission of Vera, a ritual dance with singing, which is often regarded by the Rongga people as their unique identity. The aim of the chapters is, ﬁrst, to provide a description of Vera, outlining its socio-cultural and historical signiﬁcance for the Rongga people in the context of modern Manggarai Indonesia. It will be shown that Vera is losing its appeal with the younger generation and is a threatened ritual. The second aim, related to the ﬁrst, is to show that Vera needs proper documentation, and that this must be done in the context of modern language and cultural documentation. Finally, the chapters also aims at discussing the complexity, challenges and prospect of maintaining Vera within broader language maintenance and revitalization projects. The chapter is organized as follows. A description of Vera is given in Section 5.2. This section is a brief introduction to what Vera is (Section 5.2.1), followed by an outline of the social, historical and cultural signiﬁcance of Vera (Sections 5.2.2–5.2.3) and its linguistic resources. Discussions of its current state as a threatened song/dance style and the importance of safeguarding it in line with the UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) are also given in this section (Sections 5.2.4– 5.2.6). Section 5.3 reports and discusses prospects and challenges of documenting and revitalising Vera. Scenarios of endangerment of song/dance styles are given in Section 5.3.1, followed by an outline of what has been done and what still needs to be done for the documentation of Rongga (Section 5.3.2). Discussion of the viability of maintaining/revitalizing Vera (its positive and negative variables) is given in Section 5.3.3. A conclusion is given in Section 5.4.

5.2 Vera: More than a Dance 5.2.1 What is Vera? Vera is a ritual dance accompanied by singing, the song being of a special kind, expressed in poetic language, containing historical and philosophical messages. The

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word Vera in Rongga is believed to have come from pera, meaning ‘the ancestor’s testament’ (Indonesian: wasiat leluhur). The ancestors’ messages and teachings contained in Vera have been practiced and passed from one generation to the next. Vera is traditionally performed by adult (male and female) dancers, who form two lines, and a leading dancer. The female dancers, called daghe, stand in front. The male dancers, called woghu, stand behind the daghe. The single male leading dancer, called the noa lako, stands in front of the daghe. He starts the dance and leads the two groups of dancers. The song initiated by the noa lako or woghu is followed by all daghes. Not all songs are accompanied by musical instruments. While dancing and singing, the dancers hold hands (cross-armed) in a row. They dance moving forward and backward, sometimes going around, doing certain synchronized leg and body movements. A Vera performance lasts for hours, starting at midnight and ﬁnishing the following morning when the sun rises. The performance is closed with a song, called tangi jo. Vera is not merely a means of entertainment but is a highly valued cultural practice for the Rongga people. Its songs contain verbal expressions and, as such, it serves not only as an artistic and crucial form of cultural expression but also as an essential source of history, knowledge, identity, and philosophical guidance. 5.2.2 Identity and history in Vera Vera serves as a cultural identity for the Rongga people. The Rongga people are generally quite aware that Vera is unique to their ethnic group in Flores. It is perhaps the only cultural practice that the Rongga people are very proud of. However, as I argue below, while a sense of cultural pride is a positive variable, cultural pride appears not to be enough to resist the heavy pressure caused by other socio-political and linguistic factors that have resulted in the current marginalization of the Rongga culture and language. Internally within the ethnic group of Rongga, Vera also serves as a clan identity because certain Vera songs may be uniquely associated with certain clans or sub-clans. 1 For example, a fragment of a Vera song from the Motu clan, below, tells the origin of the clan. The histories of other clans are also generally recorded in Vera. (1)

Following is a fragment of Vera text from the Motu clan: Motu Weka ndili mai, Weka ndili mai Jawa Name down come Name down come Java ‘The Motu Weka who came here (were) the (Motu) Weka