Enggano in the Austronesian family: Historical and typological perspectives

Enggano, with about 1000 speakers, is spoken on Enggano Island, off the southern coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. Enggano is classified as "threatened": only the elder generation are fully competent and fluent speakers. Many children speak Indonesian and little to no Enggano. Intensified contact with non-Enggano speakers is likely to continue and spread throughout the island, to the detriment of Enggano.

The first aim of our project is to document the Enggano language: we will record, transcribe, translate, and analyse a body of traditional stories, conversations, cultural events, and descriptions of everyday tasks in the Enggano language. With the permissions of the speakers, we will make these recordings available on the project web page, and we will deposit the dataset in a standard archive at the end of the project. This will allow the data to be preserved for future research and, for the Enggano community and its descendants, as a record of possibly the last generation of fluent Enggano speakers.

The second aim of the project is to produce a grammar of Enggano in its Austronesian context, thoroughly describing the major structures of the language. Our research will draw on previous work on the language, the dataset that we will collect, and targeted work with Enggano speakers on the details of Enggano language structures. The resulting reference grammar will be valuable as a detailed study of the grammatical structures of the language, particularly to linguists specialising in the Austronesian language family, since it will allow for comparison of the structure of Enggano to corresponding structures in other languages of the region. We intend to publish the grammar through an open-access publisher: this will make our work accessible to researchers in linguistics and related fields worldwide, and in particular to researchers in Indonesia, for whom academic books are sometimes inaccessible or too expensive to acquire.

For linguists, Enggano is an intriguing puzzle: it has been claimed by some linguists to be a member of the Austronesian language family, like many other languages of the region, but by other linguists to be an isolate with no known relation to other languages. We believe that Enggano is an unusual Austronesian language, but further evidence is required to firmly establish the place of Enggano within Austronesian: almost all of the work that has been conducted on the genetic affiliation of Enggano is based on research by the linguist Hans Kähler, conducted on a single seven-month visit in 1937-8. Additional work is needed to test and supplement Kähler's data and to determine how the language has changed in the intervening years. We will devote one or more chapters of the grammar to an exploration of Enggano's genetic affiliation and relation to other Austronesian languages.

Finally, we will work to empower the Enggano community to document and preserve their own language. A central component of this effort is our plan to develop educational materials for teaching the Enggano language in local schools, targeting Years 7-9 (ages 13-15). We will work with local educators and community leaders to develop these materials and to raise awareness of language and cultural endangerment, and with local government institutions to ensure that our educational materials meet local government standards.

Enggano Island has a complicated history. For reasons that are unclear, the Enggano population dropped from 6,420 in 1866, to 870 in 1884, to 291 in 1913 (Suzuki 1958; Jaspan 1964). In 1937, Kähler estimated that there were 200 speakers of Enggano. The island was further affected when, in 1961, a juvenile/young adult detention centre was established in Enggano, leading to a heavy influx of non-Enggano-speaking offenders from elsewhere in Indonesia (Jaspan 1964). By 1963, indigenous Engganese constituted only 1/8 of the total population of the island. In the present day, Enggano is classified as a "threatened" language by Ethnologue (Simons 2018). Although we believe that the population of Enggano speakers has now increased to about 1000 speakers, only the older generation are fully competent and fluent speakers. The community is fully aware of the precarious state of the Enggano language, but there are currently no organized, community-based efforts to document and preserve the language, despite enthusiasm from younger members of the community. Our project will benefit the Enggano community in several ways.

First, we will strive to involve the entire Enggano community in the documentation effort, and in a wider discussion of reclamation and maintenance of local cultural heritage in the broader Indonesian context. The key stakeholders in this effort are community leaders, including Clan Elders who are fluent speakers of the language as well as university-educated young adults who are dedicated to finding a way of preserving traditional Enggano language and culture in a contemporary context. Their leadership will ensure the sustainability of this effort in the long term, after our project is finished.

A key component of this effort is our plan to produce educational materials to enable teaching of the Enggano language to students in Years 7-9 (ages 13-15) in local schools. Local impact from this activity will come in two waves. First, we will involve local educators, Clan Elders, and community leaders in the design, creation, and testing of these materials, using the Enggano data we will collect as a basis. This will ensure that these crucial stakeholders are perceived as leaders in the language and culture preservation effort. Second, deployment and use of the educational materials in schools will increase awareness, knowledge and use of the Enggano language among children and teenagers, and will enhance the viability of the language preservation effort in the long term.

A secondary effect of our work is our contribution to economic growth: in the short term, by employing members of the community as project consultants, and in the long term by increasing the worldwide visibiity of Enggano language and culture through our academic presentations and our website and hence promoting tourism and helping local businesses.

Finally, we plan to increase general awareness of linguistic issues in Indonesia by writing one or more general-readership articles on detecting relationships between languages, for publication in a prominent on-line Indonesian publication. We hope that a greater awareness of linguistic issues in Indonesia, in which 719 languages are spoken, will help in other language documentation and preservation efforts for other languages.