LexiRumah: An online lexical database of the Lesser Sunda Islands

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Anthropology
• Historical Linguistics

Background:

• The Lesser Sunda Islands host a unique contact zone between Austronesian and Papuan languages.
• This region exhibits high linguistic diversity but lacks extensive historical and ethnographic data.
• Lexical data is crucial for reconstructing human history and population movements in data-scarce areas.

Purpose of the Study:

• To address the lack of accessible lexical data for Lesser Sunda languages.
• To create a consistent, online database (LexiRumah) of lexical information.
• To facilitate research on language relationships, subgroupings, and contact in the region.

Main Methods:

• Assembling lexicons from diverse published and unpublished sources, including fieldwork.
• Developing a consistent format for online accessibility of lexical data.
• Aggregating and analyzing lexical data from various source types and qualities.

Main Results:

• The LexiRumah database provides a unified resource for Lesser Sunda language lexicons.
• The project generated practical guidelines for creating comparable lexical databases.
• Facilitated exploration of linguistic relationships and hypothesis testing for the region.

Conclusions:

• LexiRumah is instrumental for studying language evolution and change in understudied regions.
• Consistent database design is vital for comparative linguistic research in pre-literate societies.
• This work provides a model for creating similar databases in other data-limited areas.