Documentation of Kenyah

Collaborating Institution:Culture Sector, UNESCO Jakarta Office [external link]
MPI Scientist:Antonia Soriente

The objective of this project, co-funded by the Culture Unit of UNESCO office, Jakarta, is to document and preserve two endangered Kenyah isolects, Lebu’ Kulit and Òma Lóngh.
Few descriptive studies of Kenyah exist, and most of them are unpublished. No thorough description of any Kenyah isolect has ever been produced. The only existing documents in Kenyah are a few wordlists and a Bible translation in one isolect, Leppo’ Tau.
Antonia Soriente, an affiliated scientist of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has recently completed a PhD dissertation on the classification of Kenyah isolects. Based on a set of innovations shared by the variants investigated, she proposed a subgroup called Kayan-Kenyah, comprising two major subgroups: Kenyahic and Kayanic. This project will focus on documenting two isolects, Lebu’ Kulit and Òma Lóngh.
Speakers of Lebu’ Kulit are in the process of shifting to Leppo’ Tau‚ a more prestigious Kenyah isolect. This makes the documentation of Lebu’ Kulit an important and urgent scientific task. Òma Lóngh has unusual idiosyncratic features not found in better known isolects, but has never been described or even mentioned in language maps. This isolect is also under strong pressure from more prestigious Kenyah isolects, and is at risk of being abandoned by its speakers.
Previous fieldwork has consisted almost exclusively of wordlists. Yet a comprehensive description of Kenyah can only be achieved once textual data has been collected in at least some isolects, so an analysis can be made of its morphology and syntax. Recording Kenyah isolects in electronic form, transcribing the recordings, and describing their structure will not only be a boon to Austronesian studies and to general linguistics, but may also instill a pride of the language among its speakers, and encourage them to preserve their cultural and linguistic heritage. This, in turn, will be a small addition to international efforts to preserve the world’s cultural and linguistic diversity.
The project consisted of recording various types of texts, including oral literature and oral history; transcribing texts with the assistance of native speaking consultants; analyzing the texts to produce linguistic studies; and last but not least, making texts available to members of the community on audio cassettes as well as in written form. The data were entered into a computerized database using an in-house FileMaker database solution developed at the Jakarta Field Station. This will assist in both its preservation and its analysis. Poems, songs, music, and dances performed by members of Lebu’ Kulit and Òma Lóngh communities were video recorded. These were made available to researchers in MPEG-1 format and to the local community in VCD format; VCD, while rarely used in industrialized countries, is the medium of choice in rural Indonesia. Finally, automatically generated glossaries of Lebu’ Kulit and Òma Lóngh were produced, with a view to producing dictionaries of the isolects in the future.
Output
The first output of this documentation project is the publication of a book containing 15 stories in the two languages titled Mencalèny & Usung Bayung Marang. A collection of Kenyah stories in the Òma Lóngh and Lebu’ Kulit languages mainly meant for the use of the community. The next step will be the detailed analysis of the linguistic data to be displayed in a reference grammar of the two languages.