Sasak and Samawa project

Sasak and Samawa are Austronesian languages spoken on Lombok and Sumbawa Islands respectively, in eastern Indonesia.

Location of Samawa language, Sumbawa Island, eastern Indonesia (from https://joshuaproject.net/assets/media/profiles/maps/m15119_id.pdf)
Approximate Linguistic Map of Lombok Island, eastern Indonesia (from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linguistic_map_of_Lombok.png)

I have carried out fieldwork on both languages, commencing in 1995, and have done research on the grammatical structure of both languages as well as their sociolinguistics. I collaborated with Yon Mahyuni, who wrote his PhD thesis on Sasak at University of Melbourne, and with Herman Suheri, Nur Ahmadi, Lalu Hasbollah, Lalu Dasmara, Sudirman, and Syahdan. I am currently working on a project with Prof Bernd Nothofer of Frankfurt University supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to study the complex speech levels system of Sasak and its historical origins.

Publications

  • Austin, Peter. 1996. Ergativity, clitics and grammatical relations in Sasak. In Miriam Butt & Tracy Holloway King (eds.) LFG-Workshop, 45-59. Stanford: Stanford University.
  • Austin, Peter K. 2000. Verbs, valence and voice in Sasak. In Peter K. Austin (ed.) Working Papers in Sasak, Vol 2, 5-23. Melbourne: La Trobe University.
  • Austin, Peter K. 2001. Verbs, valence and voice in Balinese, Sasak and Sumbawan. In Peter K. Austin, Barry Blake & Margaret Florey (eds.) Valence mechanisms in Indonesia, 47-71. Melbourne: La Trobe University. download
  • Austin, Peter K. 2003. The Linguistic Ecology of Lombok. PELBBA 16, 165-198. link
  • Austin, Peter K. 2004. Clitics in Sasak, eastern Indonesia. Manuscript. SOAS University of London. link
  • Austin, Peter K. 2004. Les clitiques du sasak (Indonésie de l’est). Faits de Langues 23-24, 195-212. link
  • Austin, Peter K. 2006. Content questions in Sasak, eastern Indonesia: an optimality theoretic syntax account. In Fritz Schulze & Holger Warnk (eds.) Insular Southeast Asia: Linguistic and Cultural Studies in Honour of Bernd Nothofer, 1-12. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.
  • Austin, Peter K. 2010. Reading the lontars: endangered literary practices of Lombok, eastern Indonesia. In Mark Turin & Imogen Gunn (eds.) Language Documentation and Description 8, 27-48. London: SOAS. link
  • Peter K. Austin. 2012. Tense, aspect, mood and evidentiality in Sasak, eastern Indonesia. In Stuart McGill & Peter K. Austin (eds.) Language Documentation and Description 11, 231-251. link
  • Austin, Peter K. 2012. Too many nasal verbs: dialect variation in the voice system of Sasak. In Alexander K. Adelaar (ed.) Voice variation in Austronesian languages of Indonesia. Nusa 54, 29-46. link
  • Austin, Peter K. 2013. Tense, aspect, mood and evidentiality in Sasak, eastern Indonesia. In John Bowden (ed.) Tense, aspect, mood and evidentiality in languages of Indonesia. Nusa 55, 41-56. link
  • Austin, Peter K. and Bernd Nothofer. 2019. Speech levels in Sasak, eastern Indonesia. University of Frankfurt, MS.
  • Austin, Peter K.  2021. Going on the Hajj: An annotatated text in the Menu-meni variety of Sasak, eastern Indonesia. Ethnorema 17, 91-111. link

Unpublished

  • Austin Peter K. 2014. Aksara Sasak, an endangered script and scribal practice. Paper prepared for International Workshop on Endangered Scripts of Island Southeast Asia, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 27th February to 1st March 2014. link