His calm, self-effacing demeanor does not diminish by one iota his charisma as one of the world’s highly respected linguists.

Bernard Comrie, an English-born language typologist, was here in Indonesia to give a lecture on different, yet related, issues on word order typology, the typology of the relative clause, the typology of voice systems, and the typology of Southeast Asian languages. Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features.

The three-day talk was attended by students from the applied linguistics graduate school at Atma Jaya Catholic University, Jakarta.

In the field of linguistics, precisely in language typology, Comrie is considered an authoritative figure because his many groundbreaking scholarly works have been used as important and mandatory references worldwide, and been translated into different languages such as Japanese, Korean, Italian, Spanish and Chinese.

JP/Setiono Sugiharto

His more recent work, available online for free, The World Atlas of Language Structures (2005), which he co-edited with M. Haspelmath, M.S. Dwyer and D. Gill, reflects Comrie’s never-ending passion to develop the subject.        

Due to his valuable contributions in his field, Atma Jaya University, Jakarta conferred an honorary degree on him. The conferment coincided with the golden anniversary of the university, which fell on June 1.

Now director of the Department of Linguistics at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, and also a distinguished professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the US, Comrie has long befriended noted Indonesian linguists such as Bambang Kaswanti Purwo and the late Soenjono Dardjowidjojo, with whom Comrie often works collaboratively and exchanges ideas related to the field of language acquisition.   

“My experience working with Indonesian scholars has always been very positive, and I find Indonesia in general a very open country, the people are very interested in ideas from outside. And they are very passionate in contributing their own ideas,” Comrie said in an interview with The Jakarta Post.

Comrie’s passion in researching the Indonesian language and its local varieties led him to sign a joint research project and to establish the Jakarta Field Station (JFS) at the Center for Studies in Language and Culture, Atma Jaya University.

Despite the fact that the foci of research are mainly on child language acquisition, the JFS has been vastly expanding its research areas into a variety of languages in Indonesia like Riau Indonesian; Ternate Malay; Minang; Jambi; Kenyah dialects in Kalimantan; and Javanese dialects of Tenggar, Semarang and Banyumas, among others.

One of great contributions of the collaborative research initiated by the JFS, Bambang Kaswanti Purwo says, is the collection of a substantial corpus of video recordings of children’s interactions in Jakarta Indonesian, which constitute one of the largest individual collections in the international CHILDES (the Child Language Data Exchange System) database of child language acquisition.

Linguists can easily access the database, which contains the language of six Indonesian children in their first five years of acquiring native Indonesian, and those interested in investigating a child’s language acquisition.   

Unlike his American counterpart David Gill, who also works for the JFS, Comrie cannot speak Indonesian.

Despite this, Comrie, a top world linguist who speaks English, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, French and German, is certainly knowledgeable when asked to discuss the system of the language.

He said non-linguists are often surprised that he should show such an interest in the languages of Indonesia.

“It may be worth explaining why linguists, as people who study language and language scientifically, are interested in languages they don’t speak. In addition to my interest in learning languages, I developed a paralleled interest in learning about languages,” soft-spoken Comrie said.

Comrie pointed out that the exotic aspect of the Indonesian language that he finds interesting to study lies in the social aspect; that is, in addition to the standard written language, Indonesian has rich social-conditioned nonstandard local varieties that are, more or less, closely related to each other.

Being a descriptive linguist, Comrie views that a mutual relationship exists between the Indonesian standard language and its nonstandard varieties.

“Understanding the relationship between forms in the standard language, in nonstandard varieties, and in varieties on the border line of the standard language can provide us insight into the overall structure of the Indonesian language and perhaps even enable us as scientists to gain a better understanding of the construction found in the standard language,” he argued.

Growing up in a part of northern England where the community was monolingual, Comrie has been fascinated by both individual languages and by the general phenomenon of language since childhood.

At secondary school, he took French and Latin, and other languages such as German and Ancient Greek, where he was often the only, or almost the only, person in the class.  

Comrie’s current research interest is the typology of numeral systems – the different kinds of systems that exist across the world for expressing numbers.

Among the many Indonesian local varieties, the numeral system of the Balinese language has captured his attention. The numeral system in this language has been cross-linguistically compared with other languages including the standard Indonesian as well as the English numeral system.

“I don’t speak Balinese,” Comrie said, adding that “information on the numeral system of the language has proved invaluable to me in my search to characterize the overall cross-linguistic possibilities for constructing numeral systems”.

“It would be interesting, for example, to find out the geographical distribution of the system across languages from different families. That is what a linguistic typologist typically does.”   

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