The Tring Dialect of Long Terawan.
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THE SARAWAK MUSEUM JOURNAL |
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Title :
The Tring Dialect of Long Terawan. |
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Author :
Robert Blust |
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Abstract:
The linguistic situation in the basin of the Baram river of northern Sarawak is one of the most complex on the entire island of Borneo. Although all of the indigenous languages of this region with the possible exception of Kayan-Murik belong to a single large and internally diverse subgroup (Blust 1969, 1972), linguistic differences within the area appear only occasionally to reflect simple differentiation in situ. More commonly, as a result of centuries of migration along the major waterways speakers of closely related languages have become separated and interspersed among speakers of other, sometimes markedly different languages, in an intricate interdigitation of speech communities that plays havoc with the mapmaker’s representation of language boundaries. Long Terawan, on the Tutoh some 12 miles above its junction with the Apoh, epitomizes this striking juxtaposition of disparate ethnolinguistic groups, for here two quite distinct languages are spoken in a single longhouse. The first of these is a divergent dialect of Berawan, the closest relatives of which are found down the Tutoh at Batu Belah, and - more distantly on the Tinjar at Long Teru and Long Jegan. A vocabulary of this language, with sketchy notes on the phonology and grammar, has been pubhshed by Proctor (1979).1 The second language spoken at Long Terawan was described by my informant as “Tring”. The name “Tring” or its apparent equivalent “Treng” occurs repeatedly in the literature on ethnic and linguistic classification in Borneo, with a referent that remains in certain respects unclear. A few words of clarification are thus perhaps in order.
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| DOI: XXXX |
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How to cite:
Blust, R. (1984). The Tring Dialect of Long Terawan. The Sarawak Museum Journal, XXXIII (54): 101-136 |
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References
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