The Berawan Comparative Glossary: Motivation, Challenges and Undergirding Principles
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33736/jbk.8818.2025Keywords:
Austronesian, Berawan, Borneo lexicography, glossary, orthographyAbstract
The paper describes the motivation for the glossary, the challenges in eliciting vocab on traditional lifestyle, flora and fauna, and the principles undergirding a unified orthography. Berawan is a language family comprised of four lects. The Berawan settlements are located along the Tinjar and Tutoh rivers, which are tributaries of the Baram River in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. The main output of this lexicography project was a comparative glossary with 1163 lexical items and for each of these items, all four lects are displayed side by side with English and Malay glosses. The Berawan lexemes are presented using a community approved unified orthography, which represents sounds that are pronounced the same way with the same graphemes across lects but also presents differences in a consistent way. The undergirding principles for the unified Berawan orthography are linguistic soundness, cross-lectal comparability, reproducibility, teachability, acceptability to all stakeholders and economical representation of sounds and words. It is hoped that the Comparative Berawan Glossary will become an impetus for the future production of Berawan dictionaries and literature.
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