Descrizione del progetto
Promuovere i collegamenti linguistici nella Papua Occidentale
In Indonesia, il paese più multilingue del mondo, sono parlate circa 700 lingue, molte delle quali ampiamente, mentre altre rischiano di non essere più utilizzate. Inoltre, sono molti gli interrogativi sulla famiglia linguistica di circa due dozzine di lingue papuasiche parlate da circa 4 milioni di persone in un raggio di 1 000 km nella penisola di Doberai della Papua occidentale e intorno a essa. Il progetto OUTOFPAPUA, finanziato dall’UE, esaminerà se tali lingue abbiano un’origine comune. Il progetto applicherà metodi linguistici avanzati per testare l’ipotesi che queste lingue appartengano a una sola lingua papuasica occidentale. I risultati faranno luce sulla possibilità che la distribuzione linguistica rifletta una migrazione del popolo papuano, in epoca preistorica relativamente recente, dalla terraferma della Nuova Guinea verso l’esterno e verso ovest nell’arcipelago indonesiano, probabilmente a causa di innovazioni agricole indigene.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-STG - Starting GrantIstituzione ospitante
1081 HV Amsterdam
Paesi Bassi