Collecting new language data – fieldwork in Raijua and Kusa Manea, Indonesia April – May 2024

Thersia Tamelan from OCSEAN partner university – Universitas Kristen Artha Wacana (UKAW) lead two teams to collect new linguistic data in Indonesia. A team of four – Thersia Tamelan, Ifoni Ludji, Alfred Snae, Zuvyati Tlonaen went to Raijua Island in May and Kusa Manea Malaka (Timor) was visited by a team of six researchers – late June Jacob, Thersia Tamelan, Erny Hambandima, Alfred Snae, Festif Hoinbala and Brigita Hale in April 2024.

The journey to these two communities was full of challenges. It takes 8 hours by car to Kusa-Manea from Kupang, home of UKAW. The two locations visited in the Kusa and Manea areas were far apart, so long walks or pick-up trucks were used to meet the informants.

To reach Raijua island, researchers took an overnight Ferry from Kupang to Seba followed by a two-hour boat trip. The crossing from Seba to Raijua was tense because of the big waves in the open sea.

While the trips were challenging, they were worth it because the informants were very enthusiastic about participating and helping the UKAW team to collect data.

There is several motivations in collecting the linguistic data from these communities: 1) there is no existing linguistic data/study found for the two proposed languages/speech varieties Kusa Manea, variety of Uab Meto (ISO 639-3 aoz) and Raijua, a speech variety of Hawu (ISO 639-3 hvn),  compared to other well-studied neighbour languages such as Hawu Seba and Amfo’ang and Amanuban. These speech varieties have no concepts in lexiRumah; 2) to have linguistic data for comparative studies which can support OCSEAN in probing the human past, especially the migration of the Austronesian people in Eastern Indonesia; 3) to maintain the language by providing some materials/literature for the community such as picture dictionary and phonological sketch; and 4) to collect data for other further research which is of interest to team members.

The informants were all native speakers of different genders, ages, and educational backgrounds, in Kusa Manea there was 9 informants and on Raijua 11 informants.

UKAW team collected the OCSEAN wordlist of 1228 words for both languages and in addtion, various texts with different topics. The team succeeded in collecting the complete wordlists for both of the languages. Reasearchers would have wanted to collect more texts, especially the folklore, but due to time constraints these were left for future visits. However, some native speakers were trained as Research Assistants, and they will continue to help the follow-up collections of more diverse data.

Based on these visits, the UKAW team would like to study several ideas further: 1) to do a comparative study on the phonology of languages in the area; 2) to evaluate the current orthographies and provide literature for school children to read in their language; 3) to study the shifting values of the tradition in the Sabu and Kusa-Manea community.

We will process and archive the data in PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) so that data is available for other researchers. The wordlist are used also to write a picture dictionary for each language to help the preservation of the language and give the community back from the researchers. UKAW team plans to analyze the data to draft a phonological sketch of the two languages and other articles to follow. 

Both communities shared a lot about the daily lives and customs, UKAW team observed that some traditions are still being carried out, but there is a shift in the original values. Thus, there is hope to to revisit the two communities and further research these topics in addition to the primary language data collection.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 873207.

(diambil dari postingan The OCSEAN Consortium : https://www.ocsean.eu/post/collecting-new-language-data-fieldwork-in-raijua-and-kusa-manea-indonesia-april-may-2024)