Indonesia exhibits great linguistic diversity, yet even the most widely spoken of the Indonesian languages remain poorly studied. Particularly lacking are systematic phonological studies and instrumental phonetic investigations. The goal of this project is a detailed phonetic and phonological analysis of several related Indonesian languages of the Western Austronesian language family (including Indonesian, Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, and Batak). It will involve basic description and documentation of these languages, while including several specific research projects focusing on the phonotactics and prosodic systems of these languages. Building on these basic descriptions, an investigation of the influence of regional languages (Javanese and Batak) on the structure of Indonesian will also be carried out. This work will be carried out through study of previous sources on these languages, consultations with native speaker consultants, and acoustic analysis of recordings of multiple speakers. The end result of the project will include a bibliography on recent work on the structure of Indonesian languages, a systematic acoustic database analyzing the phonetic properties of the consonants and vowels of each of these languages, articles on topics such as stress and the prosodic structure of Indonesian, the phonetics and phonology of glides, the structure of geminate-singleton contrasts, and influences on Indonesian of regional languages, and a monograph on the phonetics and phonology of the languages under investigation. The project will have the dual purpose of providing a comprehensive understanding of several languages meriting fuller study, while at the same time providing a new source of data for the testing of linguistic theories, thereby broadening our understanding of the nature of human language.
