Alor-Pantar Languages: Origins and Theoretical Impact

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This research project, directed by PI Gary Holton, is the US portion of a larger international collaboration that was conceived under the European Science Foundation's EUROCORES Programme, EuroBABEL. The full EuroBABEL project is a collaboration of researchers from three countries, including the US, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. This particular project focuses on the linguistic prehistory of the non-Austronesian languages the of Alor-Pantar archipelago of southeastern Indonesia. The Alor-Pantar languages represent one of only two groups of non-Austronesian languages in Indonesia outside of the island of New Guinea; the remaining languages of Indonesia belong to the Austronesian family. A comparison of pronouns suggests a genetic relationship between the Alor-Pantar languages and New Guinea languages located some 1000 km distant. Until very recently the 15-20 Alor-Pantar languages have remained among the least well-documented languages of Indonesia, but a surge in field work efforts over the past decade has resulted in a wealth of new language data. This project will bring new and recently-collected data to bear on the question of the linguistic origins and ultimate genetic relationships of the Alor-Pantar languages.A major component of the analysis will be the reconstruction of the ancestral Proto Alor-Pantar language using the comparative method. To accomplish this the project will work closely with ESF partners to assemble recently-collected lexical and grammatical documentation and will supplement these with surveys of still-undocumented Alor-Pantar languages. These data will be used to infer sound changes which have occurred in the history of the languages. Evidence from sound changes will in turn allow the researchers to establish genetic subgroups and to evaluate potential genetic relationships with the languages of New Guinea.An additional component of the analysis is the study of placenames, which represent one of the most highly endangered and least documented domain of linguistic knowledge in the Alor-Pantar languages. The structure and distribution of placenames provide insight into prehistory, often reflecting pre-historic settlement patterns. Placenames also provide indirect evidence of non-linguistic history, including past climate changes, since naming practices reflect human interaction with the environment at a fixed point in time. The GIS (geographic information systems) database compiled by this project will facilitate future inter-disciplinary investigations of population migrations and environmental changes and their relationships to language change.