From Documentation to Community Engagement: Language Work on Hawu in Eastern Indonesia

This chapter describes the linguistic situation in Nusa Tenggara Timur (NTT), a province of Indonesia characterized by remarkable linguistic diversity and home to roughly 10?% of the country’s languages. While some languages in the province are clearly endangered, the majority are relatively stable, though their long-term vitality remains uncertain. Hawu, an Austronesian language primarily spoken on the islands of Sabu and Raijua, exemplifies this complexity: it is categorized as vulnerable based on the Language Endangerment Index (LEI) assessment proposed by Lee and Van Way (2016), but recent social changes have reduced its use in certain domains such as cultural and religious practices. In response to these challenges, this chapter presents our language documentation training initiative which has evolved from short workshops into more intensive programs, focusing on language documentation, capacity building, and collaborations among researchers, foreign graduate students, and native speaker students from NTT. One tangible outcome of this is a trilingual Hawu storybook. Reflections on the training and collaborations provides insights for future directions of language documentation in Indonesia.