If I were given a research grant to study Malaysia's language and culture, I would likely focus my efforts on studying either 1) the heavy dialects of Northwestern Malaysia on the border with Thailand or 2) how indigenous groups on Borneo are using their Malay and how this gets infused with native language and culture. Both of these dialects have come up in my conversations with Melissa, since the former is very difficult for a speaker of 'standard' or 'Kuala Lumpur' Bahasa Melayu to understand (think us listening to a very thick Scottish or Irish accent), and the latter speaks more akin to Indonesian and pronounces words as they are spelled ("boku") rather than with the standard colloquialisms of West Malaysia. In many senses these two distinct foci could not be more different, and if I had to choose I would likely pick the latter and conduct linguistic study in Borneo because it is still far less known and documented than the Malay-Thai one.
It would certainly be difficult to get started, and from the beginning I would make sure that I have a fairly strong handling of Bahasa Melayu before going, in the event that it could be used as a common language. The more organic form of language learning, or learning directly from native speakers and not going off of translation from a mutual language, would likely be too time consuming and difficult for a grant, so having Malay as a mutual language would be very beneficial. I would try to get a contact in the host community to help introduce me and the purpose of my study, as it would make very little sense to go in blind. During all of this, I would also be sure to have a solid grip of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and the act of transcribing, as well as recording equipment to perhaps create a digital dictionary as well.
In terms of what I would investigate, it would most likely focus on grasping concepts of time, place, directionality, etc. in the language in the abstract, as well as discovering which words are used to describe more day-to-day activities such as hunting and the like. I am thinking back to the Namibian Himbas and how this tribe saw colors differently, shedding light on the sheer difference in worldview that can occur. Perhaps living in the rainforest of Borneo could have some sort of sizable effect on worldview that has not yet been recorded. Beyond this larger component, it would be important to uncover the basic structure of the language and determine if it is Austronesian, how it uses lexical and grammatical categories, etc. This is of course a lot of work and I would need to pick one tribe and hone in on their language as well as gain acceptance in shadowing them (as this is a common problem for cultural anthropologists), but the tradeoff could be documenting an endangered language and contributing to the larger scale, worldwide knowledge of linguistic structure and efforts in language preservation as well.
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