SGER: Exploratory Fieldwork with the Nedebang Language of Eastern Indonesia

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With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Gary Holton will conduct six weeks of exploratory field work with Nedebang, an endangered non-Austronesian language spoken by fewer than one thousand persons on Pantar Island, eastern Indonesia. The project has three primary objectives: (1) to gather basic phonological, lexical, and grammatical information from which to compile a short sketch of Nedebang; (2) to conduct a survey of the grammatical and typological properties of the non-Austronesian languages of Pantar Island; and (3) to assess the feasibility of future longer-term field investigations of the languages of Pantar. Data and recordings gathered during the course of the project will be archived for use by other researchers.The project is significant for three main reasons. (1) The Pantar languages are currently being replaced by languages of wider commuication. The timing of this research will ensure that information regarding Nedebang and other Pantar languages is recorded before the language ceases to be spoken. (2) The Pantar languages appear to belong to the Trans-New Guinea language family, a putative grouping of more than 500 languages spoken in the New Guinea region. However, their precise genetic relationship is unclear. Data from Pantar languages will contribute to a better understanding of both internal and external genetic relationships. (3) What data are available suggest that the grammatical structures found in the Pantar languages differ significantly from those found in other languages. The results of this research will add to our knowledge of human language and linguistic theory by providing detailed documentation of a typologically unusual language.