6 Figure 3. Villages on Enggano island
3
The three central villages of Malakoni, Apoho and Meok have greater percentages of native Enggano residents, while the outlying villages of Banjarsari, Kaana and
Kahayapu have larger immigrant populations. Ferries to Bengkulu depart from Kahayapu and Malakoni.
1.2 Previous research on Enggano
The first substantial documentation of life on Enggano began when Enggano’s contact with the outside world increased in the last half of the nineteenth century.
Dutch administrators and explorers made numerous trips to the island and published several general reports on the people, culture and language. These include Boewang
1854, van der Straaten and Severijn 1855, von Rosenberg 1855, Walland 1864, van der Hoeven 1870, and Helfrich 1888. These reports culminated in an often cited
3
This map was created by SIL Indonesia and is used by permission. I added the points to represent the approximate place of each village’s residential area.
7 ethnographic description of the Enggano people, “The Island of Women”, by Italian
researcher E. Modigliani 1894. Ethnograpic work continued with more recent work by Tichelman 1942, Keuning 1955, Amran 1979, and ter Keurs 2006.
The first linguistic records from Enggano are the brief wordlists found in van der Straaten and Severijn 1855 and von Rosenberg 1855. Both of these wordlists were
recorded by nonLlinguists unfamiliar with the Enggano language, so their accuracy is doubtful. Helfrich and Pieters 1891 published an extensive wordlist, with extensive
corrections and additions published a few years later Helfrich 1916. The complete wordlist contains over 1,000 items, with glosses in Malay and Dutch. Also available is
the Holle List for Enggano Stokhof 1987, which was collected in 1895 and also contains over 1,000 items. These two extended wordlists represent the first substantial
records of the Enggano language. The first and only major linguistic analysis of Enggano was conducted by German
linguist Hans Kähler in 1937. The results of this research include a published grammar 1940, dictionary 1987, and texts 1955; 1961; 1973; 1975. Kähler’s grammar and
dictionary are the sources for most typological and comparative work on Enggano. While the grammar and dictionary are both extensive, the only mention of phonology in
either one is a list of consonant and vowel phonemes and a short paragraph describing some basic features. The list of phonemes in the dictionary does not agree with the one
in the grammar, and some of the dictionary’s transcriptions are inconsistent. The font used in the publication causes poor legibility for some words. Prentice 1989, among
others, questions the accuracy of the transcriptions. The only literature that discusses Enggano phonology is Kähler’s grammar and
dictionary, along with Nothofer’s more recent paper on loanwords in Enggano, which has a list of phonemes Nothofer 1992. Table 1 shows Nothofer’s analysis of the
consonant phonemes.
8 Table 1. Consonant inventory from Nothofer 1992
Bilabial Alveolar
Palatal Velar
Glottal Stop
p b
t d
k ʔ
Nasal m
n
Trill r
Fricative h
Approximant w
j There are extensive differences between this analysis and Kähler’s. Kähler adds ɲ
and x as phonemes but does not include w. He claims that t and r are marginal, occurring only in certain dialects, adding tʃ,
4
dʒ, f, and l as marginal phonemes as well. These differences are summarized in Table 2.
Table 2. Difference between consonant inventories Kähler dictionary
Kähler grammar Nothofer 1992
p √
√ √
b √
√ √
t marginal
marginal √
d √
√ √
tʃ marginal
√ LLL
dʒ marginal
marginal LLL
k √
√ √
ʔ √
√ √
m √
√ √
n √
√ √
ɲ √
√ LLL
r marginal
marginal √
f marginal
marginal LLL
x √
√ LLL
h √
√ √
w LLL
LLL √
j √
√ √
l marginal
marginal LLL
Table 3 shows Nothofer’s analysis of vowel phonemes.
4
Kähler’s dictionary indicates tʃ is marginal, while his grammar indicates it is not.
9 Table 3. Vowel inventory from Nothofer 1992
Front Central
Back High
i ĩ
ɨ [ ̃
u ũ
Mid e
ẽ ə
ə̃ o
õ
Low a
ã As with the consonant phonemes, there are many differences between Nothofer’s
and Kähler’s analyses of vowel phonemes. Kähler’s dictionary does not include the high central vowels [ ̃ and [ ̃. His grammar, on the other hand, includes a set of low mid
vowels ɛ, ɛ̃, ɔ, and ɔ̃ but does not include ẽ, ə, ə̃, or õ. Table 4 shows the difference between the vowel inventories in the same sources.
Table 4. Difference between vowel inventories Kähler dictionary
Kähler grammar Nothofer 1992
i √
√ √
ĩ √
√ √
ɨ LLL
√ √
[ ̃ LLL
√ √
u √
√ √
ũ √
√ √
e √
√ √
ẽ √
LLL √
ə √
LLL √
ə̃ √
LLL √
o √
√ √
õ √
LLL √
ɛ LLL
√ LLL
ɛ̃ LLL
√ LLL
ɔ LLL
√ LLL
ɔ̃ LLL
√ LLL
a √
√ √
ã √
√ √
The Kähler grammar also lists seventeen diphthongs as part of the phoneme
inventory. All the diphthongs go from low to high, beginning with a, e or o and ending with e, o, i or u. Diphthongs are not mentioned in any of the other
sources.
10 Besides Nothofer 1992, recent discussion of Enggano has mostly been limited to
brief mention of the language in historical comparative and typological work on Austronesian languages. These begin with Dyen’s lexicostatistical analysis of
Austronesian wordlists 1965. Dyen’s analysis puts Enggano’s highest percentage of shared vocabulary at 11 with Murut, a language of Borneo. While the lexicostatistical
method is not generally considered valid for determining language relationships, Enggano’s extraordinarily low percentage of shared vocabulary still shows that it is not
closely related to any of the surrounding languages. The comparative work with the most thorough discussion of Enggano is Nothofer’s article on the Sumatran Barrier
Islands languages 1986. Nothofer provides quantitative evidence for subgrouping Sichule Sikule, Nias, Mentawai, and Simalur Simeulue. Enggano, however, is
included only as a possible member of the subgroup because it is so deviant from the other languages in the Barrier Islands.
Other authors take widely differing approaches to Enggano’s classification. Mahdi 1986 groups all Austronesian languages in Western and Eastern subgroups, with most
of the Barrier Islands languages in the Western subgroup and Enggano in the Eastern subgroup. Capell 1982 takes a cautious approach, classifying Enggano as a nonL
Austronesian isolate. He concludes, “Enggano does not in fact belong to the [ProtoL Austronesian] group” p. 4. The Ethnologue summarizes the lack of consensus on
Enggano’s classification: “Not closely related to other languages. Not conclusively established as an Austronesian language, rather than an isolate with Austronesian
loans.” There are three other studies discussing other aspects of the Enggano language.
Nothofer 1992 lists sound changes that occurred in the adaptation of loanwords from MalayIndonesian and Minangkabau into Enggano. Schmidt 1988 discusses the sound
changes that occurred in Enggano over the past fifty years. Enggano is undergoing rapid
11 change under influence from Malay and Indonesian in its grammar, lexicon, phonology
and domains of use. A very recent study of bilingualism patterns among the Enggano people by Simanjuntak 2009 shows that Enggano is still a vital language used in
conjunction with Standard Indonesian for daily life. Simanjuntak states that attitudes toward both Enggano and Indonesian are positive.
12
CHAPTER 2 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY
