Background: This research project aims to document and investigate the morphology of Amarasi (ISO: aaz), an Austronesian language spoken in the Kupang Regency of South-West Timor in the East Nusa Tenggara Province of Indonesia. Spoken by approximately 80,000 individuals, Amarasi is the westernmost end of a complex language/dialect continuum falling under the umbrella of Uab Meto (also known as Timorese, Dawan(ese), or Atoni).
In collaboration with native speakers and community members, primary data collection took place from October -- December 2022 in the Amarasi Barat district. Data collection focused on naturalistic data including narratives, oral histories, and songs/poetry. This data is currently being processed into linguistically-annotated trilingual audio recordings suitable for adaptation into community-facing literary, pedagogical, and/or reference material for the Amarasi-speaking community, with a broader goal of helping to preserve linguistic diversity in the region.
From a theoretical perspective, the collected data is also being used to analyse the morphology of Amarasi and trace its development over time, so as to further our understanding of linguistic universals, grammatical structure, and the ways in which languages change. Amarasi has innovated many novel constructions and characteristics in comparison to its ancestor language Proto-Malayo-Polynesian. As such, this project investigates the origin of several of these innovations, including prefixal subject agreement, verbal inflection classes, and a ternary class distinction, and explores what these systems tell us about languages throughout Nusa Tenggara Timur.
Speaker: Tamisha L Tan is a final year PhD Candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University and an affiliate of Nanyang Technological University. Before pursuing her doctoral studies, she received a BA (Hons) in Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on historical linguistics and theoretical morphosyntax, with a specific emphasis on the Austronesian languages of South East Asia.
