Linguistics prof Bill Davies awarded NSF grant

The grant will allow him to document the language of the Baduy
Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Bill Davies
William Davies

University of Iowa Professor William D. Davies has been awarded a grant of $300,400 from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Documenting Endangered Languages program to document the language of the Baduy of Indonesia.

Davies is a professor and the chair of the Department of Linguistics, part of the UI College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. The three-year project, conducted in collaboration with faculty at Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, will document the language of the Baduy Dalam, a small group living in a remote area in western Java, the principal island of Indonesia. The Baduy cut themselves off from society some 500 years ago in order to in order to preserve their traditional culture. But the language and culture are now at risk due to encroaching economic and social pressures.

The project team will work with the Baduy to document the language in several ways: by video recording conversations and personal and historical narratives, collecting vocabulary and creating dictionaries (focusing on culturally distinctive concepts), and developing a grammar sketch based on the recorded video and discussion of specific phrases and sentences. All of the material will be archived and be made available to the public and scholars via the Internet, and books and CDs will be created for use by the Baduy.

More information on the Baduy is available at http://clas.uiowa.edu/linguistics/baduy-indonesia.

The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.