Marian Klamer is Professor of Austronesian and Papuan Linguistics at the Centre for Linguistics and Director of The Graduate School of Humanities. She investigates smaller, under-described Austronesian and Papuan languages in Indonesia, and the history and culture of the populations who speak the languages.

More information about Marian Klamer

Fields of interest

• Papuan and Austronesian languages and linguistics
• Malay varieties
• language description and documentation
• language contact and change
• historical linguistics
• linguistic typology

Research

In my research, I combine primary documentation of little-known languages with the comparative examination of their lexical and grammatical characteristics to formulate insights relating to their grammatical typology, history, contact, and language evolution. I have done fieldwork on 25 Austronesian and Papuan languages spoken by small-scale communities in Indonesia and published grammars of two Austronesian languages (Kambera, Alorese) and three Papuan languages (Teiwa, Kaera, Sentani), and authored numerous papers on grammatical characteristics, contact phenomena and historical evolution of the languages of Indonesia. Applying recent technical advances to primary field data, I co-authored work on the application of agent-based models of intergenerational transmission to explain morphological simplification due to contact, and Bayesian phylogenetic models to infer the structure of the Timor-Alor-Pantar language family using lexical data. In collaboration with native speakers in Indonesia I published several dictionaries and collections of stories for local speech communities. With my teams I created the open access database LexiRumah to make word lists from more than 300 minority languages in Indonesia available to linguists and the general public. I supervised more than 20 PhD candidates.

Grants and awards

• 2019 Elected Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Amsterdam

Grants, as Main applicant:

• 2026 NWO-Open Competition-Large grant € 800,000
• 2025 COIngrant for research infrastructure, Leiden University € 10,000
• 2017 NWO - Promoties in de Geestesweteschappen - ‘Tracking Malay migration history through the genealogy of vernacular Malayic varieties’ € 200,000
• 2014 NWO – VICI Grant, ‘Reconstructing the past through languages of the present’. € 1,500,000
• 2014 NWO – Aspasia premium, € 100,000
• 2012 CLARIN-NL Language Archive of Insular South East Asia and West New Guinea (LAISEANG). € 80,000
• 2009 European Science Foundation (ESF)-EuroCORES. EuroBABEL Research Project ‘Alor-Pantar languages: Origins and theoretical impact’. € 935,000
• 2001 NWO Vernieuwingsimpuls (VIDI) Grant ‘Linguistic variation in Eastern Indonesia’. € 650,000
• 1996 KNAW Royal Academy Fellowship, 1996-1999. ‘Grammaticalization in languages of Eastern Indonesia’. € 140,000
• 1990 NWO Personal grant, 1990-1994. Individual PhD Research project ‘The morphology of Kambera’. € 90,000

As Grant Co-Applicant:

• 2019 European Commission Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange grant, OCSEAN € 1,959,600
• 2019 NIAS Lorentz workshop The Future of Academic Lexicography, November 2019, Prof. dr. F. Steurs, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal, Leiden € 20,000
• 2018 DReaM: The Dictionary/Grammar Reading Machine, 2018-2021. ERA Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage (JPI CH). PI: Harald Hammarström, Uppsala University, co-applicant Dr S. Robert, LLACAN,CNRS Paris. € 220,000
• 2015 NIAS Theme group on Phylogenetics and Linguistics. Co-applicant  Harald Hammarström (Radboud U). € 75,000
• 2015 NIAS-Lorentz workshop on Phylogenetics and Linguistics, October 2015. Co-applicant  Harald Hammarström (Radboud U). € 20,000
• 2009 Australia-Netherlands Research Collaboration (ANRC). Workshop Grant. ‘Melanesian languages on the edge of Asia’ (8-12 Feb 2010, Manokwari, Papua) with Prof. Nicholas Evans (Australian National U) and Dr Wayan Arka (U Udayana, Indonesia). € 37,590
• 2004 The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, SOAS, London. 2004. Project ‘Documentation of Klon, Abui, and Teiwa’. Co-applicant Dr Louise Baird. € 15,000

Total as Main applicant & Co-applicant € 6,856,190

Curriculum vitae

Publications

Activities