About the project

This project studies the non-Austronesian languages the of Alor-Pantar archipelago of southeastern Indonesia. Until very recently the 15-20 Alor-Pantar languages were among the least well-documented languages of Indonesia, but a surge in field work efforts over the past decade has resulted in a wealth of new language data. The AP languages are of special interest because they have no established genetic relatives and are surrounded by Austronesian languages.

Structure and Funding

This research project is a larger international collaboration that was conceived under the EUROCORES Programme of the European Science Foundation, EUROBABEL. It is a collaboration of researchers from the Netherlands, the UK and the US. 

The project is divided into three Individual Projects (IPs): the Dutch IP will extend the documentation of these languages, the UK IP investigates their word class typology, and the US IP studies their linguistic prehistory.