Traditional Jambi Malay

Traditional Jambi Malay is an endangered Malay variety spoken in the area surrounding Jambi City in Jambi Province, southeast Sumatra, Indonesia. The PI/Co-PIs are Peter Cole and Gaby Hermon of the University of Delaware, and Uri Tadmor, the Director of the Jakarta Field Station of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. They are assisted by Yanti, a former research assistant at the Jakarta Field Station and native of Jambi, who is currently pursuing a doctoral program at the Univesity of Delaware, and by several native speaker consultants in Jambi.

It is widely believed that the Malay language originated in Sumatra, explaining the fact that dozens of Malay dialects are spoken on the island, none of which have been well described. The majority of native speakers of Malay live in Sumatra, many more than in Malaysia, for example. Yet there is not even one thorough grammatical description of a Sumatran Malay dialect. One of the expected results of this project would be the first detailed description of such a dialect.

Among the Malay dialects of Sumatra, Traditional Jambi Malay is an ideal dialect for a study because Jambi is widely considered to be the original locus of the Malay language. Many believe that it was from Jambi--and later from Palembang--that Malay spread throughout much of Southeast Asia. Thus, Jambi is an important key to understanding the complex diasystem of hundreds of Malay dialects. While Jambi Malay as a whole is not in immediate danger of extinction, conservative varieties of the language are being rapidly replaced by an urban koine, which is spreading from Jambi City. As a result of the koineization process, many of the distinctive features of Jambi Malay have been lost in Jambi City. As this process spreads to the hinterland, Traditional Jambi Malay will eventually cease to exist. The purpose of the project is to document the dialect before this occurs.

In addition to the grammatical description of Traditional Jambi Malay, the long-term results of this project are expected to include:

• Documentation of the language in the form of a computerized database of texts linked to digital recordings in a variety of genres, including narratives, conversations on various topics, songs, poems, riddles, jokes, and ritual texts.
• Two volumes, consisting of oral history and folk tales respectively, to be published locally for the benefit of the local community. These volumes could be used for the muatan lokal, the "local component" that should be integrated into national school curricula according to Indonesian Department of Education directives.
• An automatically generated glossary of Traditional Jambi, which in the second stage of the research (beyond the present project) could be expanded into a full-fledged dictionary.
• A series of theory oriented studies based on the data.
• This project is a collaborative effort funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation,grant number BCS0444649, and by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

  Pictures of Jambi

  Children in Tanjung Raden	Jambi City, seen from Tanjung Raden, across the Batanghari River
  The groom arrives	Jambi Wedding: Children in Ceremonial Role