Two PhD , Descriptive​/Documentary Linguistics in Indonesia

Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) invites applications for two fully funded PhD positions within the NWO project ‘Usku and Banda:
Automated Documentation of Endangered Languages of Eastern Indonesia’.

The two PhDs in this project will each work on the documentation and description of a small unwritten endangered language in eastern Indonesia.

The first PhD project focuses on Usku (also called Afra), a Papuan language spoken in the north-eastern part of the Indonesian province Papua in the western half of New Guinea. Usku is a moribund isolate with around 100 speakers that is surrounded by communities speaking languages belonging to other Papuan families.

The second PhD project focuses on Banda, an Austronesian language spoken by 4,000 speakers on the island of Kei Besar in the Indonesian province Maluku.

As the younger generations of speakers of Usku and Banda are reported to be switching to the dominant national language Indonesian, it is unlikely that the languages will be transmitted to the next generation, and both languages may become extinct within two generations. For this reason, documentation of these two unique languages is extremely urgent.

For both Usku and Banda, the aim is to develop, in close collaboration with the speaker community, a documentary record of linguistic practices in the form of a rich, naturalistic text collection and an extensive word list (lexicon). The transcribed and annotated lexicon and corpus will form the basis of the grammatical analysis of the language’s phonology, morphology and syntax. The analysis will allow us to address questions such as: (i) How do the words and grammatical structures of Banda/Usku reflect possible inherited (vertical) family relationships and ancestral history?

(ii) Which of these words and structures may have been acquired through (horizontal) contact with neighbouring languages or Indonesian/Malay? (iii) What does this tell us about the community’s socio-cultural history and their relationships with other communities? This information is expected to provide important insights into earlier patterns of migration and contact in the region.

In the course of their documentation activities, both PhDs will test and evaluate the various AI tools that are being developed by the senior team members to carry out automated tasks of transcription, translation, morphological segmentation and glossing of data from small and under documented languages.

These PhD positions are part of an NWO-funded Open Competition Large project involving PI prof. dr. Marian Klamer, external partner dr. Eline Visser (Uppsala University) and research engineer dr. Sophie Villerius.

• Collecting audio-visual linguistic and cultural data through fieldwork in Indonesia;
• Transcribing, annotating, analysing and archiving naturalistic language data;
• Testing and evaluating tools for automated linguistic data annotation and analysis;
• Presenting (joint) research results at workshops and conferences;
• Publishing (joint) research results and writing a PhD-thesis within the period of appointment;
• (Assisting in) teaching…