| The focus here is on the languages of Indonesia, and on language contact and the historical relationships between Austronesian and Oceanic languages in Papua New Guinea and the Melanesian islands. The recently completed NWO project The pioneers of island Melanesia has succeeded in reconstructing a contact history at unusual historical depth by employing a highly sophisticated reconstruction model inspired by biological cladistics and applied to the reconstruction of the sound systems and grammars rather than the vocabulary of the languages under study. This line of research is now being further developed in two new externally financed projects: the NWO VIDI project Reconstructing prehistoric language contact in the Solomon Islands (2005-2010), and the NWO programme Breaking the time barrier: The languages of the Sahul (2006-2009). In these projects, there is close collaboration with the Max Planck Institute Nijmegen and with the Australian National University in Canberra and with the University of Melbourne. |
