Chapter 4: lexicon
Sula words: (a-f) (g-k) (l-r) (s-y)
The following dictionary includes many of the words I have collected during my research into the Sula language. It is by no means exhaustive, but it has ample basic vocabulary for a beginning Sula learner to hit the ground running. Where possible, entries record the location and year that items were collected. All items (except where noted otherwise) were provided or verified by more than one speaker. In some cases my first source of a vocabulary item is noted, but in other cases that was not possible, because I either neglected to note the source or there were simply too many sources for a source notation to be meaningful.
This dictionary cannot always be used to indicate correct dialect forms, unfortunately, because it includes data from elicitations that began prior to my ability to differentiate Sula dialects. Throughout most of the course of my work, time constraints and logistical constraints also prevented setting up the controls that would be necessary to gather data that could be cleanly attributed to various dialects—for instance, my elicitation sessions were often carried out in Sula, where I would speak a mishmash of the language including words learned in various locations and from various speaker demographics. When this was not the case, I spoke a mixed form of Indonesian that blended Basa Malayu (regional Malay) with standard Bahasa, and I often worked with assistants from villages other than the one where I was eliciting. As such, my consultants were not always primed to first produce their own dialect’s preferred forms.
An exception to this are the wordlists and dialogue samples that I compiled for comparative sociolinguistic research. These lists were rigorously balanced by age, gender, and location, and always with multiple speakers of the same dialect involved to keep consultants primed in their respective dialects. These word lists can and should be used for Sula dialectology (see archival materials and Appendix I).
Most of the dictionary entries also include the name of the island it was collected on (Sanana or Mangon), and this usually (but not always) indicates whether a form is of Sanana or Mangon type. The exception to this is words from mixed dialect regions where settlers from one island established a new community on the other island. Please also refer to chapter two for a description of the language’s main dialect division. Information in that chapter will in most cases provide enough information to discern how dictionary terms should be altered to form the other dialect’s version.
This wordlist pulls from various elicitations conducted over the past ten years. The primary elicitation sources were Swadesh lists for basic vocabulary; the Holle list vocabulary set via Stokhof (1980) for expanded basic vocabulary items, and for referencing language change over the past century; and the lonely Planet Indonesian edition’s glossary, for more practical, modern travel language; and various topicalized word lists. Except where otherwise noted, each entry was produced independently by at least two speakers or produced by one speaker and independently verified by at least one more. The list is probably overly inclusive for lexicographic standards, but since there are so few sources of Sula vocabulary available, I determined it better to be overly inclusive than to omit potentially useful words. Notations are often made to indicate suspect items.