Fieldwork Methodology and framework

1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION 9 As for language use, quite a sharp distinction needs to be drawn between the capital Raha and the villages in the interior. In the villages Muna is dominant, Indonesian being mainly restricted to the schools. Everybody is fluent in Muna, but presumably a large percentage do not speak Indonesian. In Raha this situation is reversed. Indonesian is dominant, even in families where both parents are from Muna. The percentage of children born in Raha of Muna parents but not fluent in Muna is probably quite high. Foreigners living in Raha Chinese, Bugis, Javanese very rarely learn to speak Muna, a fact which the Muna people themselves attribute to the difficulty of their language. While Muna is certainly not an easy language to learn mainly because of its complex inflectional morphology, the socio-linguistic situation in Raha is probably an equally important factor. All over Muna education is in Indonesian, with Muna used as the language of instruction in the lower forms. No educational material is available in Muna, but at present a Muna language team is trying to change this situation by producing material in the local language. There are also plans for a dictionary and an anthology of Muna prose and poetry.

1.3. Methodology and framework

1.3.1. Fieldwork

My first visit to Muna was in August of 1984 and was meant to be a fact-finding trip. No real research was done, although I gathered some language data. The main purpose was to make contacts at various levels, find suitable language helpers and a place to live. Thanks to the kind cooperation of many people, this visit proved a success. In July 1985 my wife and I arrived in Muna and stayed there till November 1986 for an extensive period of fieldwork. The first four or five months were spent acquiring a proficiency of the spoken language, although Indonesian continued to be indispensable for discussing specific grammatical and lexical points. We rented a house in Raha and lived there, but in addition we made frequent tours to villages in the interior. During these first months the basic pho-nology and the inflectional system were analysed. From January 1986 onwards the emphasis shifted to the analysis of derivational morphology and syntax. In order to achieve this it was crucial to have a good corpus of texts. Ultimately we had some 75 texts of varying lengths at our disposal approximately 150 typed pages. We acquired these texts in the following ways: 1. Record a spoken text and transcribe it or have someone else transcribe it; 2. Ask literate people to write a text; 3. Cull texts from published and non-published sources. The provincial office for education and culture in Kendari has collected a number of Muna folk stories. These unpublished stencilled collections contained much valuable material. Every text was carefully checked with language helpers for the meaning and the use of particular structures and words. Then lists and charts were made for various phenomena for example, for negation, for each affix, for each demonstrative and so on, on the basis of which preliminary conclusions were drawn which were further checked against new material, corrected, supplemented and so on. In addition a dictionary file was set up, eventually containing some 2,500 root entries. On our return to the Netherlands the actual writing started, followed by a short fieldtrip to Muna in January and February of 1988, in which the chapters 10 A GRAMMAR OF THE MUNA LANGUAGE written thus far were checked and more information was collected on obscure or difficult points. This grammatical description of Muna is based on the speech variety in kecamatan Katobu to which Raha belongs, as this was the area where we lived. Our main language helpers, Laode Abdul Fattah and Hanafi BA, were both natives of Katobu born in Loghia and Watuputi respectively. The speech in Katobu is a subdialect of standard Muna, and where it deviates from subdialects spoken in Tongkuno, Kabawo and Lawa, I have tried to indicate this.

1.3.2. Framework