In 2018 and 2019, I had the opportunity to spend some time working with three language groups on the island of Sumba in Indonesia: Kodi, Lamboya and Wanukaka. I was invited by the Indonesian foundation Suluh Insan Lestari to work on developing new alphabets.
A small collections of Kodi, Wanukaka and Laboya word list (audio) recordings done by Misriani Balle are available for download at PARADISEC. The language we spent the most time with is Kodi, spoken by about 90,000 people. This project was part of a mother-tongue-based literacy program sponsored by INOVASI, an Indonesian government program for innovation in education, and run by the Indonesian foundation Suluh Insan Lestari. You can read about the mother tongue literacy program here or watch this video (in Indonesian).
Misriani and I gave a presentation on the participatory methods and outcomes of working with the community in moving towards a standardized alphabet at the KOLITA conference at Atma Jaya University in Jakarta on April 12, 2019. I also talked about the orthography design process at a conference in Kendari, Sulawesi in 2019. Work on Kodi phonology is ongoing, but Misriani and I presented an overview of issues in the phonology of Kodi at the ICAPaW 2019 conference at Universitas Udayana, and together with Owen Edwards we will present on issues in vowel length and metathesis at APLL13 in June 2021.
For Wanukaka and Lamboya, both available at PARADISEC as well, only a provisional analysis of these word lists was done in order to work out the inventory of phonemic segments (in consultation with some previous studies).
My application for a grant to do more extensive documentation and description in Sumba was not accepted, and I am no longer actively pursuing research in Sumba. The background information I collected on the linguistics of Sumbanese languages was presented at the InLaLi conference in February 2020, and is now available in the journal NUSA.
Joseph Lovestrand 