Innovating Works

OUTOFPAPUA

Financiado
Papuans on the move. The linguistic prehistory of the West Papuan languages.
This project combines urgent documentation of endangered languages in Indonesia with rigorous investiga-tion of a linguistic puzzle that has important implications for our understanding of both Melanesian and Southeast Asian prehi... This project combines urgent documentation of endangered languages in Indonesia with rigorous investiga-tion of a linguistic puzzle that has important implications for our understanding of both Melanesian and Southeast Asian prehistory. Some two dozen Papuan languages, scattered over a 1000km on and around the Bird's Head of West Papua, show signs of sharing a common origin. The OUTOFPAPUA project uses cut-ting-edge methods in historical linguistics to test the hypothesis that these languages belong to a single West Papuan language family, and to investigate the possibility that their distribution reflects a migration of Papuan people, in relatively late prehistoric times, from the New Guinea mainland outward and westward into the Indonesian archipelago. The project will also address the question of what drove this putative expansion, in particular the possibility that it had to do with indigenous agricultural innovations. Thus, it contributes both to the difficult enterprise of uncovering genealogical relationships among the diverse languages of New Guinea, and to a growing body of research that questions the orthodox linguistic understanding of eastern Indonesia's prehistory in terms of an eastward expansion of Austronesian speakers at the expense of less dynamic Papuan populations. At a methodological level, the project furthers the development of techniques for establishing remote historical linguistic relationships in the absence of written records of relevant languages. The project will make innovative comparisons using a suite of techniques, including the application of new computational methods, the construction of a lexical database of unparalleled richness in Papuan linguistics, and by giving a prominent role to semantic shifts, paleolinguistics, and morphology and paradigms in the reconstructive project. This research aims at achieving a breakthrough in the study of human prehistory in one of world’s oldest areas of human settlement. ver más
31/08/2025
1M€
Duración del proyecto: 67 meses Fecha Inicio: 2020-01-24
Fecha Fin: 2025-08-31

Línea de financiación: concedida

El organismo H2020 notifico la concesión del proyecto el día 2020-01-24
Línea de financiación objetivo El proyecto se financió a través de la siguiente ayuda:
ERC-2019-STG: ERC Starting Grant
Cerrada hace 6 años
Presupuesto El presupuesto total del proyecto asciende a 1M€
Líder del proyecto
STICHTING VU No se ha especificado una descripción o un objeto social para esta compañía.
Perfil tecnológico TRL 4-5