The proposed planning visit will develop a long-term collaboration between the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and Leiden University in the Netherlands. The objective of this collaboration is to reconstruct the linguistic prehistory of the Alor-Pantar language family. The Alor-Pantar languages are among the least studied languages of Indonesia, and their genetic relationships with other languages in the region remain the subject of some controversy, largely due to the scarcity of relevant data. The host for the planning visit is Dr. Marian Klamer of the Leiden University?s Center for Linguistics. Dr. Klamer is a linguist whose work has focused on the minority languages of eastern Indonesia. She directed the Linguistic Variation in Eastern Indonesia: The Alor and Pantar Project, which provided the first comprehensive survey of Alor-Pantar languages. During the planning visit the researchers will assemble a database of 500 lexical items and develop a future strategy for collaboration between the two institutions.
