Perspectives on the Bird's Head of Irian, Jaya, Indonesia: Proceedings of the Conference, Leiden, 13-17 October 1997 (review)

New Guinea’s westernmost extension is a large peninsula known as Bird’s Head. Like all of New Guinea, it lures the scientist with its biological and linguistic diversity. This area is especially interesting for its geographic proximity to island Southeast Asia and for its substantial Austronesian-speaking population. Reflecting the first international multidisciplinary conference to study Bird’s Head, the several dozen papers in this thick volume address the area’s history, anthropology, demography, geology, botany, and archaeology as well as its indigenous languages. The present review will concentrate on the papers dealing with linguistics, though some of the contributions on cultural anthropology and prehistory likewise contain material of interest to the linguist.

Nine articles specifically address linguistic topics (503–716). William A. Foley’s ‘Toward understanding Papuan languages’ contains a general typological comparison of Austronesian and Papuan phonology, morphology, and syntax. In ‘The art of the storyteller in Abun society’ Christine Berry discusses eight types of repetition used in the narrative style of Abun, a West Papuan language. Philomena Dol’s ‘Form and function of demonstratives in Maybrat’ examines deictic proximity in another West Papuan language. In ‘Syntactic constructions and the Meyah lexicon’ Gilles Gravelle shows how a Papuan language from a different genetic group uses a small inventory of root words in various standardized phrasal patterns to convey a wide range of psychological and physiological states. In ‘The bird said “I am here”: A prosodic study of the waimon story in Mpur’, Cecilia Odé discusses narrative prosody in a Papuan tone language. Ger P. Reesink’s ‘The Bird’s Head as Sprachbund’ addresses the interesting topic of language mixing between Austronesian and Papuan languages and also discusses the composition of the so-called West Papuan phylum. In ‘Some remarks on the linguistic position of the Inanwatan language’, Lourens de Vries examines structural parallels between Marind languages and Inanwatan, a Papuan language spoken on the southern coast of the Bird’s Head. In ‘The Trans New Guinea Phylum hypothesis: A reassessment’ Andrew Pauley essentially defends the hypothesis, citing phonetic correspondences and cognates in basic vocabulary that suggest a common origin for about 500 of New Guinea’s languages. He further suggests that the initial spread of the peoples speaking these languages was due to the adoption of root crop agriculture about 8,000 years ago. In ‘Where does Malay end and Tidore begin’, Miriam van Staden examines extensive code switching and borrowing from Austronesian into Tidore, a Papuan language spoken on one of the North Molucca islands.

The book’s closing article, written by Peter Bellwood and titled ‘From Bird’s Head to bird’s eye view: Long-term structures and trends in Indo-Pacific prehistory’ (951–75), merits special attention for its argument that Papuan peoples and languages largely resisted replacement in the face of the Austronesian expansion, unlike aboriginal island Southeast Asia, thanks to the prior establishment of agriculture in New Guinea’s extensive fertile highlands. An area such as Bird’s Head of Irian Jaya, with its complex geographic juxtaposition of Papuan and Austronesian languages, offers an ideal microcosm for further exploration into the ecological dimensions of language history.