What am I actually doing (with my life)?

For about one and a half years I have been working on my PhD project about the history of the North Halmahera languages. In this blog post, I want to describe briefly what I am actually doing.

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What are the North Halmahera languages?

Halmahera is an island in East Indonesia, close to the equator and between Sulawesi and New Guinea. The island looks a little bit like a star with four peninsulas connected in the center. Halmahera and the surrounding islands are part of the so-called Spice Islands. You may have heard about them in the context of European explorations. These islands were for a very long time the only place in the world were specific spices, especially cloves and nutmeg, were grown. For hundreds of years, these spices have been exported to Asia and Europe. Many people came to the islands to trade. The sultanates of Ternate and Tidore (located on the islands of the same names) were for a long time important centers of trade and extremely powerful. The region was colonialized by Spain, Portugal, England and finally the Netherlands in order to get easier access to the spices.

From a linguistic perspective, it is remarkable that Halmahera is divided into two parts. In the south (on the southern and southeastern peninsula as well as the southern parts of the northeastern peninsula) Austronesian languages are spoken. Austronesian is a huge language family that expands over parts of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. (I will probably write about it in the future.) On the northern and northeastern peninsula of Halmahera as well as surrounding smaller islands, non-Austronesian languages are spoken – the North Halmahera languages. Often they are also called Papuan languages. This does not mean that they are related to languages on the nearby island New Guinea (often called Papua by linguists). “Papuan languages” is a purely geographic name for the languages of the area.

The languages on North Halmahera and surrounding islands are definitely related, therefore linguists have identified the language family North Halmahera. The North Halmahara languages form a language family like Austronesian or the Indo European languages to which German and English belong. What exactly constitutes a language family will be the topic of a future post.

These are the North Halmahera languages: Galela, Loloda, Tobelo, Pagu, Modole, Tabaru, Sahu, Ternate, Tidore (the last two are spoken on the island of the same name) und West-Makian (spoken on the island of Makian).

The North Halmahera languages are considered as “threatened”. This means that fewer and fewer speakers pass on the languages to their children. In the long run, no new speaker generations will grow up – the languages will die out. The reason for this is the dominant role of the local variety of Malay and Indonesian. These languages sever as of official and contact languages (in the case of Malay the language is not officially recognized by the Indonesian state but it is de facto used as an official language in daily life). They are also used in schools. To provide a good future for their children parents decide against teaching the local languages to their children and use Malay instead.

What is my PhD project about?

I am a historical linguist. My PhD project is about the history of the North Halmahera languages. This means I am trying to find out:

• How the languages changed throughout time (language change)
• Are some of the languages more closely related (like German is more closely related to Dutch than to French even though they are all three Indo European languages, classification)
• Where the languages came from and how they spread (urheimat)
• How they were influenced by neighboring languages and how they influenced other languages (language contact)

I will write blog posts about all these topics in the future. For now, I will describe what my daily tasks look like.

Essentially my work is all about processing and analyzing data. All North Halmahera languages were described in a way at one point. Missionaries and linguists created dictionaries, wrote grammars and collected and translated texts. In addition, manuscripts in Ternate and Tidore date back to the 17^th century. This means that the North Halmahera languages probably are the best documented Papuan language family. Due to the intensive contact with foreign countries, historical works are abundant too. They also contribute indirectly to our knowledge about the language (e.g. they mention which language was spoken where and when).

All this data will be analyzed by me and I will use it to answer the questions listed above. For this purpose I have spent most of my time so far to digitize dictionaries and word lists in order to upload them to the database of the project for which I am working. And “digitize” means: type and edit them and often also translate them (from Dutch or Indonesian). With the help of the database I will be able to simplify future tasks, hence the effort is worthwhile. But because there are so many dictionaries and word lists, I have spent quite a big amount of time on this task. I uploaded the last big dictionary at the end of January (and there are still some smaller unedited ones). But it is worth the time since I already have contributed more than 25,000 dictionary entries to the database. Compared with other Papuan languages that is an enormous amount.

I have now started comparing the languages, I will write about this in the future. Another main task is reading, mostly grammatical descriptions and historical works. I am also collecting data for West Makian since this languages was not studied that much in the past. But: I am not writing dictionaries. I am also not learning the languages like one learns foreign language such as French. If I remember words or phrases in the languages that is rather by chance. My PhD project is not a classical language documentation either whereby linguists visit the speakers of a language and describe it – this has already happened to a smaller or bigger extent for all North Halmahera languages (even though documentation could be better but I don’t want to complain).

So much for now about my work and the languages. If you have questions or suggestions for future blog posts, please let me know. Hopefully, I will publish a blog post every month in German and English.

Literature

Voorhoeve, C. L. 1988. The Languages of the North Halmaheran Stock. Papers in New Guinea Linguistics 26. 181–209

Attribution

Richaringan, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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