Lexical resources for Enggano, a threatened language of Indonesia

Enggano, with about 1500 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.

Our current AHRC project (AH/S011064/1) has four main aims: we are documenting and preserving the language by creating a dataset of transcribed, translated, and analyzed audio and video recordings; we are examining the vocabulary of contemporary Enggano to explore the relation of Enggano to other languages of the region; we are reporting on our research by writing papers and articles, and we are working on a reference grammar of Enggano; and we are working with the community and with local educators to preserve the language by providing textbooks that will enable the teaching of Enggano in local schools.

In the course of our research, two areas have emerged in which additional work is needed. The first involves in-depth research on Enggano wordforms, combining contemporary fieldwork with the analysis of historical datasets and wordlists. There is a good deal of historical material on Enggano, from vocabulary recorded by visitors to Enggano Island in the 19th and 20th centuries, to dictionaries and short grammars written by linguists in the 20th and 21st centuries, in addition to our own research on the contemporary language. Our project will create a large electronic database of Enggano wordforms, drawing on historical work on Enggano as well as our own fieldwork. We will select a subset of Enggano wordforms for intensive study of their history, their relation to the corresponding forms in other languages of the region, and the history of the form for words borrowed from other languages. We will make our database publicly available on our project website, and we will deposit it in a standard linguistic repository at the end of the project, so that it will remain perpetually available for research use. Our work will provide a window on the development of Enggano vocabulary since the mid-19th century, and will help to answer questions about the pre-history of Austronesian migration and the structure of the Austronesian language family

The second need is to support the Enggano community in their current work on cultural and language reclamation/maintenance/revitalization. We propose to extract two products from our Enggano lexical database. First, we will produce a learner's Enggano-Indonesian-English dictionary in both hard copy and electronic form, coordinated with the Enggano textbooks that we are producing in our current project. The dictionary will be illustrated with photographs and drawings of local plants, animals, and culturally significant objects. Second, we will produce a mobile phone-based Enggano-Indonesian-English dictionary app for use by the entire community, also illustrated with photographs and drawings.

Our work will stand as a model for the combination of linguistic fieldwork on a threatened language with historical linguistic work incorporating older databases and wordlists. It will benefit the Enggano community, who will gain a window on the history of their language which would otherwise have been closed to them, and will serve as an exemplar for similar efforts for other communities of speakers of endangered languages.