Kula is an endangered and undocumented non-Austronesian language spoken by approximately 5,000 people in the eastern highlands of Alor, Indonesia. Alor and neighboring Pantar are home to around 20 non-Austronesian (or 'Papuan') languages. This group of 'Papuan outliers' has become of increased interest to linguists in the past decade for their typologically unique features and for the light they shed on the topic of Papuan prehistory. Despite this increased interest, Kula remains almost entirely undocumented. Furthermore, ongoing language shift threatens the Kula language with many children now learning the local variety of Malay as their first language.
This grant from will support both urgently needed documentation of Kula and related research for Nicholas Williams's doctoral dissertation on place reference in Kula. This research promotes a new model of language documentation which takes as its central focus the use of language in everyday conversation. The primary goal of the documentation project will be to produce an extensive corpus of video recorded spontaneous conversation in Kula. These recordings will be transcribed, annotated, glossed and translated in preparation for archiving, further research and use by the Kula community. Using the corpus, Nicholas will explore Kula speakers' use of spatial language and other semiotic practices (e.g. pointing) for achieving reference to places in the course of social interaction. This research asks the important question of how grammatical practices emerge in the course of social interaction, focusing on the domain of reference. This research will introduce new methods to the field of language documentation and new data and analyses to the field of interactional linguistics.
The documentation materials will also become an important resource for the Kula community in any future language maintenance activities. As the first project of its kind, this work will have a positive effect on local language attitudes, potentially increasing the relative prestige of the language and mitigating the progress of language shift. By training native speakers in the basic techniques of language documentation and archiving materials locally, the project will ensure community access to the materials.
This award supported doctoral dissertation research on Kula, an endangered and undocumented language of Eastern Indonesia. The project provided training for a graduate student and experience conducting fieldwork in a challenging setting, contributed to the ongoing viability of the Kula language, and produced important research results which will have an impact on studies of non-Austronesian languages and studies of langauge use and social interaction. During 15 months of fieldwork in Alor, Indonesia, we collected more than 50 hours of video recordings of everyday conversations and other types of languages use by speakers of Kula. From this we have selected the best quality recordings to include in a corpus of everyday Kula language use. This corpus is being transcribed, translated and annoted to make it useful for research on the Kula language. We are also archiving the entire corpus at the Endangered Language Archive at the University of London to ensure its accessibility for all interested parties, especially the Kula community and other researchers. The archived materials will also be accessible to the public by request. This documentation work is an important first step in trying to reverse the endangerment of Kula. We also hope that our work will continue to inspire others in Indonesia fight for the rights of speakers of local languages. This corpus of Kula language use is being used in several ways: a) to produce language materials for the Kula community, including a dictionary and story books for children, b) to compile a preliminary sketch of the grammatical structure of the language, and c) to conduct research on how speakers of Kula use their language to refer to places in everyday conversation. The sketch grammar is in progress and will be published in 2014/2015. Our research on the grammar of Kula has uncovered several intersting features which distinguish it from closely related languages in the region. Of particular interest is the language's extensive use of elevational distinctions (high, level, low) throughout several parts of the grammar. This is seen in many other languages of Alor and appears to have developed in response to the environment where the language is spoken. The most exciting oucome of this project are the findings from our research on place reference in Kula conversations. While making reference to a place, person, or object in conversation appears simple on the surface, much previous work has shown the complex nature of referring to something in a way that everyone in the conversation understands. While previous work focused on the supposedly universal aspects of how reference gets done in conversation, our work on place reference in Kula has uncovered some potentially culture-specific aspects of doing reference. Speakers of Kula appear to introduce place references in conversation in a unique way. Due to the small size of the community (approximately 5,000 speakers), there is a great deal of shared knowledge among speakers. The way speakers introduce references to places in their conversations reflects this general assumption of shared knowledge of the places being referred to. Since speakers typically assume that their addressees share their knowledge of the place, references to places are introduced with rather vague expressions. Speakers may simply refer to a place as "down over there" (one word in Kula!), with a slight non-manual point, tilt of the head or eye-gaze. Further elaboration or use of a specific place name typically comes later, often in response to silence or confusion of the other person. While we are just beginning our research into the system of place reference in Kula, it appears that there are some unique features of the way speakers of Kula achieve reference to places in their everyday interactions. Our findings from this research will inform current theorizing of the relationship between language structure and social interaction and will contribute to the work of distinguishing universal from culture- and language-specific aspects of language use in everyday interaction. This type of research is key to better understanding what about human social interaction is unique and distinguishes us from our nearest primate relatives.
