Time: 2:30pm to 3:30pm
Date: Thursday, 18 April 2024
Venue: Room 3.369, HC Coombs Building or Online via Zoom
Meeting ID: 873 1509 2103
Passcode: 342661
Speaker: Keira Mullan
The Barrier Islands Languages are a group of languages located on the Barrier Islands off the west coast of Sumatra. Aside from Nias and Enggano, these languages have received little attention in recent years. These languages are a hotspot of linguistic diversity in Indonesia that can provide insights into the history of the Austronesian family and past migration in insular Southeast Asia.
This PhD is part of a larger ARC-funded Discovery Project led by Prof. I Wayan Arka titled ‘Languages of the Barrier Islands, Sumatra: Description, History and Typology’ that aims to investigate these under-documented languages to form a comprehensive linguistic dataset of the region.
My thesis will focus on Simalur [Glottocode: sime1241, ISO 639-3: smr], a language spoken on Simeulue Island, the most northern island of the Barrier Islands chain. Resources on contemporary Simalur are limited. Older resources on the language include a dictionary (Kähler, 1961) and book of texts (Kähler, 1963) as well as a sketch grammar (Faridan et al., 1981).
These resources, while providing some information on the historical state of Simalur, do not paint the full picture of the language, nor do they give insight into the contemporary state of the language. To address this gap, I will produce a grammar of contemporary Simalur based on recordings collected during fieldwork on Simeulue Island. The grammar will provide a broad description of the language from its phonology to clause structure and will contribute important data needed to understand the history of this divergent group of languages.
References
Faridan, A., Ajies, A. M. E., Usman, U., & Nuriah. (1981). Struktur Bahasa Simeulue. Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa.
Kähler, H. (1961). Simalur-deutsches Wörterbuch mit deutsch-simaluresischem Wörterverzeichnis. Reimer.
Kähler, H. (1963). Texte von der Insel Simalur. Verlag von Dietrich Reimer.
Event Speakers
CHL PhD Candidate Keira Mullan
Keira is broadly interested in morphology and morphological complexity, particularly to do with systems of nominal classification. She is also interested in typological studies of language.