Data from several Austronesian languages of Raja Ampat (As, Batta, Biga, Maˈya, Salawati)

This subcommunity contains audio, visual, and written data from several underdocumented Austronesian languages spoken in the Raja Ampat archipelago in northwest New Guinea (Southwest Papua Province, Indonesia). These languages all belong to the South Halmahera-West New Guinea (SHWNG) subbranch of Austronesian; within SHWNG, they are all classified as Raja Ampat-South Halmahera. Several lects are represented in this community: As, Batta, Biga, Maˈya (Kawe, Laganyan, Salawati, and Wauyai dialects), and Salawati (Butlih, Tepin, and Wail dialects). There are also some small collections from unrelated languages spoken nearby (viz. Moi and Seget, which both belong to the non-Austronesian West Bird's Head family). All of these languages are endangered to some degree, and the dominant language of the youngest generation across Raja Ampat is Papuan Malay.

These collections largely comprise elicited lexical and morphosyntactic data, including lists of basic words and data on the verbal subject agreement and possessive-marking paradigms. For several lects, there is also more naturalistic data collected using the 'Conversational Questionnaire' method (François 2019). Typically, each item contains an audio recording (.wav), the accompanying field notes (.pdf), a documentation file including recording and speaker metadata (.txt, .pdf), and a record of speaker consent (.pdf). As well as the raw recordings, for most of the lects there are additionally segmented audio files (.wav), to facilitate searches on a particular word or construction.

The data in this project were collected as part of a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to the depositor: 'Synchronic and diachronic investigations in Raja Ampat-South Halmahera, a little-known subbranch of Austronesian' (PF19\100004). The aims of this project were to: (1) analyse the synchronic phonology of word prosody (tone and stress) in these languages; (2) explore the interaction between the phonetic realisation of vowels and diachronic developments in the tone systems; and (3) identify the diachronic changes that have occurred in the word-prosodic systems, and use these to classify and reconstruct the ancestral state of the Raja Ampat languages. Additional financial support for fieldwork was provided by a British Academy Small Grant (SG1920\100342), and a Moray Endowment Fund from the University of Edinburgh.

This project is carried out in collaboration with the Center for Endangered Languages Documentation at Universitas Negeri Papua, Manokwari http://celd.uni-koeln.de/.