Schapper Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2019

Papuans on the move. The linguistic prehistory of the West Papuan languages.

This project combines urgent documentation of endangered languages in Indonesia with rigorous investiga-tion of a linguistic puzzle that has important implications for our understanding of both Melanesian and Southeast Asian prehistory. Some two dozen Papuan languages, scattered over a 1000km on and around the Bird's Head of West Papua, show signs of sharing a common origin. The OUTOFPAPUA project uses cut-ting-edge methods in historical linguistics to test the hypothesis that these languages belong to a single West Papuan language family, and to investigate the possibility that their distribution reflects a migration of Papuan people, in relatively late prehistoric times, from the New…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.