Project description
Advancing linguistic links in West Papua
Some 700 languages are spoken in Indonesia, the world’s most multilingual country. While many of them are widely spoken, others risk falling out of use. Moreover, there are many questions surrounding the linguistic family of about two dozen Papuan languages spoken by around 4 million people over a 1 000 km radius on and around the Bird’s Head of West Papua. The EU-funded OUTOFPAPUA project will investigate whether these languages have a common origin. The project will apply advanced linguistic methods to test the hypothesis that these languages belong to a single West Papuan language. The findings will shed light on the possibility that the language distribution reflects a migration of Papuan people, in relatively late prehistoric times, from the New Guinea mainland outward and westward into the Indonesian archipelago, possibly owing to indigenous agricultural innovations.
Objective
This project combines urgent documentation of endangered languages in Indonesia with rigorous investiga-tion of a linguistic puzzle that has important implications for our understanding of both Melanesian and Southeast Asian prehistory. Some two dozen Papuan languages, scattered over a 1000km on and around the Bird's Head of West Papua, show signs of sharing a common origin. The OUTOFPAPUA project uses cut-ting-edge methods in historical linguistics to test the hypothesis that these languages belong to a single West Papuan language family, and to investigate the possibility that their distribution reflects a migration of Papuan people, in relatively late prehistoric times, from the New Guinea mainland outward and westward into the Indonesian archipelago. The project will also address the question of what drove this putative expansion, in particular the possibility that it had to do with indigenous agricultural innovations. Thus, it contributes both to the difficult enterprise of uncovering genealogical relationships among the diverse languages of New Guinea, and to a growing body of research that questions the orthodox linguistic understanding of eastern Indonesia's prehistory in terms of an eastward expansion of Austronesian speakers at the expense of less dynamic Papuan populations. At a methodological level, the project furthers the development of techniques for establishing remote historical linguistic relationships in the absence of written records of relevant languages. The project will make innovative comparisons using a suite of techniques, including the application of new computational methods, the construction of a lexical database of unparalleled richness in Papuan linguistics, and by giving a prominent role to semantic shifts, paleolinguistics, and morphology and paradigms in the reconstructive project. This research aims at achieving a breakthrough in the study of human prehistory in one of world’s oldest areas of human settlement.
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Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
1081 HV Amsterdam
Netherlands