flowing through Bengkulu province into the Indian Ocean. It is the longest of several in the Kaur regency, with its headwaters in the 1800-meter-high Pandan Mountain. The area surrounding the Nasal
villages is mostly scrub forest and dry rice farmland under two hundred meters in elevation.
1.1.2 Linguistic setting
The tiny Nasal language is nestled amongst the Krui dialect of Lampung [ljp] and the Malay lects Kaur [vkk], Bengkulu, Serawai and Semenda [pse]. Speakers of dozens of Malay lects in southern Sumatra
number nearly five million Lewis 2009, not counting speakers of the national language, Indonesian. Speakers of Lampungic lects approach one and a half million, and Rejang 350,000. Meanwhile, Nasal
speakers number a paltry three thousand or so see §3.1.
1.2 Previous research
Nasal was evidently first documented by way of a wordlist elicited in 1895 and published in the Holle series Stokhof 1987a:143–157. In this source, the speakers are identified as belonging to the marga
Nasal Nasal clan in Bengkulu, bordering the Krui area of Lampung. Nasal data show up a second time by way of a wordlist published without comment in the Indonesian Language Center Pusat Bahasa
publication Pemetaan Bahasa Daerah di Sumatra Barat dan Bengkulu [Mapping the vernacular languages of West Sumatra and Bengkulu Provinces] Kasim et al. 1987.
Neither aforementioned publication credibly attempts to classify the language
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nor do they provide any sociolinguistic details which might help us understand the origin of this group or its relationship
with others. More recently, but prior to field research, Anderbeck 2007b:154 briefly discusses and dismisses the possibility of Nasal being considered a Lampungic lect and also uses the Holle Nasal data
as an external witness to the reconstruction of Proto-Lampungic. Given the small size of the Nasal group, it is perhaps understandable that Nasal has been
overlooked, but from another angle, its obscurity is somewhat improbable. Linguists have been studying Sumatran languages for over a century, and in the past four decades, the Indonesian Language Center
has put out scores of monographs on individual Indonesian lects, many smaller than Nasal.
1.3 Research goals and questions
We conducted field research in the Nasal language as part of SIL Indonesia’s larger program of surveying the languages of Sumatra, in an attempt to verify or clarify the general linguistic and sociolinguistic
picture. Research undertaken has mostly been of a rapid-appraisal sort, sacrificing depth for breadth of coverage, utilizing opportunistic sampling both of village locations as well as questionnaire respondents.
Findings for the Sumatran research to date include studies on language vitality, bilingualism and language identificationdialectology. On vitality and bilingualism, examples include studies of Enggano
Im and Simanjuntak 2009; Aprilani 2007, Lampungic lects Katubi 2007 and South Sumatran Malay McDowell and Anderbeck 2008; Im and Simanjuntak 2009. Possibly the greatest effort has been made
in the area of language identification, with particular focus on revising the ISO 639-3 registry of Sumatran languages International Organization for Standardization 2012. Except in cases of isolates
like Enggano or we assert Nasal, to properly identify language centers and peripheries, we frequently must supplement linguistic criteria with sociolinguistic criteria, such as mutual intelligibility, shared
literature and ethnolinguistic identity Lewis 2009. This research in Sumatra has significantly
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The authors of the 1987 monograph were informed before beginning their fieldwork that Pasemah was one of the languages spoken in Bengkulu Kasim et al. 1987:32. When none of their observation points self-identified as
Pasemah, they incorrectly assumed that Nasal was Pasemah. PasemahBesemah is a Malay lect. Evidently, the authors didn’t have a “nose” for classification.
transformed the language registry since 2000. Most of the changes have been deletions or mergers, the result of significant past overstatement of linguistic diversity. One isolate was revealed to be a phantom
Hajek 1996. We amalgamated nine Lampungic lects into three Hanawalt 2007; Anderbeck and Hanawalt 2007a; Anderbeck and Hanawalt 2007b and merged twenty-eight Malayic “languages” into
fourteen with more mergers possibly still to come Anderbeck 2008; Anderbeck 2007c; Anderbeck 2007d; Anderbeck 2007e; Anderbeck 2007f; McDowell and Anderbeck 2008. Not all was bloodletting,
however. Three “new” languages were documented: first, local vernacular Malay [zlm] and Standard Malaysian Malay [zsm] were disambiguated Anderbeck 2007g; second, Haji Malay [hji] was claimed
to be sufficiently distinct from its fellow Malay ML lects in southern Sumatra to be considered a separate language Anderbeck 2007h. The third “new” language is Nasal, the subject of this report.
In the case of Nasal, information sought through fieldwork included lexical and grammatical data, the history and background of Nasal and language-use patterns. Our research questions for Nasal fall into
two categories: about the language and about its speakers. About the language:
1. Is Nasal a distinct language from its neighbors linguistically and in terms of intelligibility?
Particularly, given its clear similarity to Lampung, should Nasal be considered a Lampungic LP lect like Krui, Komering, Menggala and others?
2. If not Lampungic, how can Nasal be classified and briefly described?
About its speakers: 1.
What can we ascertain about the history, setting and identity of the language group? 2.
How many Nasal speakers are there? 3.
How consistently are children learning and using Nasal? 4.
What benefit, if any, would Nasal speakers derive if their language were to be brought into the sphere of literacy?
2 Methodology
This section details the methods used to gather and analyze data.
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2.1 Data collection
