DATA SET NAME: Jambi City PROJECT NAME: Traditional Jambi Malay PROJECT DESCRIPTION: This project studies Traditional Jambi Malay, an endangered Malay variety spoken in Jambi Province in southeast Sumatra, Indonesia. The PI/co-PIs are Peter Cole and Gaby Hermon of the University of Delaware, and Uri Tadmor of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The are assisted by Yanti, former research assistant at the Jakarta Field Station and native of Jambi, who is currently pursuing a doctoral program at the Univesity of Delaware. The Malay language originated in Sumatra, and dozens of Malay dialects are spoken on the island, none of which have been well described. Most native speakers of Malay live in Sumatra, many more than in Malaysia, for example. Yet there is not even one thorough grammatical description of a Sumatran Malay dialect. One of the expected results of this project would be the first detailed description of such a dialect. Traditional Jambi Malay is an ideal dialect for a study, because Jambi is widely considered to be original locus of Malayu/Melayu (the Malay-Indonesian term for 'Malay'). It was from Jambi--and later from Palembang--that Malay spread throughout much of Southeast Asia. Thus, Jambi is an important key to understanding the complex diasystem of hundreds of Malay dialects. While Jambi Malay as a whole is not in immediate danger of extinction, conservative varieties of the language are being rapidly replaced by an urban koine, which is spreading from Jambi City. As a result of the koineization process, many of the distinctive features of Jambi Malay have been lost in Jambi City. As this process spreads to the hinterland, Traditional Jambi Malay will eventually cease to exist. Please refer to documentation file "Traditional_Jambi_Malay.pdf" for further information. HOW TO CITE: Yanti, Peter Cole, Gabriella Hermon, Uri Tadmor, and Bradley Taylor. 2016. Traditional Jambi Malay Database. A joint project of the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, University of Delaware and the Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and supported by Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia. ------------------------------------ Jakarta Field Station, Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 1999-2015. From 1999 to 2015, the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA), under the directorship of Bernard Comrie, maintained a Field Station in Jakarta, Indonesia, hosted by Universitas Katolik Indonesia Atma Jaya. The Jakarta Field Station (JFS) was headed by David Gil, with Uri Tadmor (1999-2009) and John Bowden (2010-2015) as the local managers, and Bradley Taylor in charge of data management. The MPI-EVA JFS engaged in a variety of projects involving the documentation, description and analysis of the languages of Indonesia. The major focus was on the compilation of corpora of naturalistic speech, while an additional focus involved the development of lexical databases. The largest single project of the JFS was a longitudinal study of the acquisition of Jakarta Indonesian by 8 young children, resulting in a naturalistic speech corpus of over 900,000 utterances. Additional child-language projects studied the bilingual acquisition of Jakarta Indonesian and Javanese, and of Jakarta Indonesian and Italian. Adult-language projects focused primarily on varieties of Malay/Indonesian and other Malayic languages, on dialects of Javanese, and on Land Dayak languages, while smaller projects covered a variety of other languages. The largest corpora are from Malayic varieties of Sumatra (over 470,000 utterances), Malayic varieties of West Kalimantan (over 330,000 utterances), Javanese dialects (over 130,000 utterances), Eastern varieties of Malay (over 120,000 utterances), Land Dayak languages of West Kalimantan (over 100,000 utterances), and Jakarta Indonesian (over 75,000 utterances). While much of the work took place in Jakarta, the JFS also maintained a branch field station in Padang, hosted by Universitas Bung Hatta, plus additional field sites of a more ad hoc nature in locations such as Kerinci, Jambi, Pontianak, Ternate, Kupang and Manokwari. Several of the JFS projects benefited from collaboration with other institutions, including LIPI (the Indonesian Institute of Sciences), the Australian National University, KITLV, the University of Delaware, the University of Naples "L'Orientale", Yale University, and others. Scholars citing MPI-EVA JFS data are expected to provide appropriate acknowledgement. Citations of data from individual projects should be made in the way specified at the project level. Alternatively, the entirety of the JFS data may be cited collectively as follows: Gil, David, Uri Tadmor, John Bowden and Bradley Taylor (2015) Data from the Jakarta Field Station, Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 1999-2015.
