A research team consisting of Dr. Peter Cole, Dr. Gabriella Hermon, and Dr. Uri Tadmor, assisted by Ms. Yanti Jotika, a graduate student in linguistics, will conduct linguistic fieldwork on Traditional Jambi Malay, an endangered Malay variety spoken in Jambi Province in southeast Sumatra, Indonesia. Malay-Indonesian is a major world language, perhaps the fourth most widely spoken language in the world. Yet there are almost no thorough scientific descriptions of vernacular Malayic languages and Malay-Indonesian dialects. Grammars of Malay-Indonesian as well as most theoretical works on the language are almost entirely based on the quasi-artificial standard language. Most native speakers of Malay live in Sumatra, many more than in Malaysia, yet there is not even one thorough grammatical description of a Sumatran Malay dialect. Traditional Jambi Malay is an ideal choice because Jambi is widely considered to be original locus of Melayu (the Malay-Indonesian term for 'Malay'), and is thus the key to understanding the complex diasystem of hundreds of Malay dialects. The linguistic field work will be carried out in two villages, Mudung Laut and Tanjung Raden, where Traditional Jambi Malay still exhibits many features lost in the koineized urban variety spoken in Jambi City. The results of the project will include a general description of the language, documentation of the language in the form of a computerized database of texts linked to digital recordings in a variety of genres, and theoretically oriented studies based on the data. An automatically generated Jambi Malay-English-Indonesian glossary will also be produced, which will serve as the basis for a Jambi Malay dictionary in the second stage of the project. Finally, the investigators will prepare two locally published volumes, one of folk stories and the other autobiographical sketches.
Broader impacts of the project include first and foremost the documentation and description of an endangered language (an important priority for linguistics around the world), as well as the training of a speaker of that language as a field linguist. The project will also create cultural materials for use by the speakers of the language. The project involves cooperation between U.S. scientists and scientific institutions abroad: The director of the Jakarta Field Station of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology is a co-PI on the project. The project also plays a role in the training of American graduate students with regard to the importance of work on endangered languages and contributing to the preservation of the linguistic and cultural heritage of a marginalized community. Equally important is the role of the project in training international graduate students.
