The digitised and annotated Holle List of the Barrier Islands languages, off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia

Gede Primahadi Wijaya Rajeg ^{1, 2} & I Wayan Arka ^{3, 2}
University of Oxford ¹, Udayana University ², & Australian National University (ANU) ³

This work is partly funded by the AHRC research to build lexical resources for Enggano, led by the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at the University of Oxford, UK. Visit the central webpage of the Enggano project.

Overview

A repository hosting (a work-in-progress for) the digitised and curated dataset of the Holle List vocabularies of languages off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia (Stokhof and Almanar 1987; Stokhof 1980). The goal is to allow computational matching between the vocabularies of these languages with the main, digitised Holle List (Rajeg 2023). The matching will provide the English, Dutch, and Indonesian translations for these vocabularies that are carried over from the main Holle List.

Please cite this repository and the presentation about the project (Rajeg et al. 2025) as follows:

Rajeg, G. P. W., & Arka, I W. (2025). The digitised and annotated Holle List of the Barrier Islands languages, off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia [Data set]. https://github.com/complexico/holle-list-barrier-islands https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/P8A3R

Rajeg, G. P. W., Arka, I. W., Pramartha, C. R. A., & Sangian, E. Z. (2025). The data science behind the curation of the Holle List: A case study from the Enggano Holle List and its neighbouring Barrier Islands Languages [Presentation]. Oceanic and Southeast Asian Navigators (OCSEAN) Conference, Faculty of Humanities, Udayana University. University of Oxford. https://doi.org/10.25446/oxford.29625407.v1

Please also cite the original sources in Stokhof (1980) and Stokhof and Almanar (1987).

Notes

Files below inside the plaintexts directory have been digitised and manually checked:

• lekon.txt (✅)

• simalur.txt (✅)

• tapah.txt (✅)

• mentawai1933.txt (✅)

These files will be supplemented with the following additional data from the neighbouring languages.

• The digitisation for $\textcolor{crimson}{\textsf{Mentawai}}$ (not the “1933” one) (page), $\textcolor{crimson}{\textsf{Nias (1905)}}$ (page), $\textcolor{crimson}{\textsf{Nias (1911)}}$ (page), $\textcolor{crimson}{\textsf{Salang and Sigule}}$ (page), $\textcolor{crimson}{\textsf{Sigulei and Salang}}$ (page), and $\textcolor{crimson}{\textsf{Seumalur (NBG 1912)}}$ (page) was conducted by my students as part of the English Lexicology and Lexicography course in the Bachelor of English Literature program, Faculty of Humanities, Udayana University. This is part of a class project to introduce WeSay to the students. The outputs of the digitisation were manually checked, edited, and fixed (by the first author, GPWR) before being published and archived as mentioned in the section below.

Updates from students’ contributions

• The Seumalur (NBG 1912) list has been published (DOI)

• The Mentawai (not the “1933”) list has been published (DOI)

• The Nias (NBG 1905) list has been published (DOI)

• The Nias (1911) list has been published (DOI)

• The Salang and Sigulè (NBG 1920) list has been published (DOI)

• The Sigulei and Salang (NBG 1912) list has been published (DOI)

We have finished the manual checking and editing (via Google Spreadsheet) of students’ digitisation works for the above regional lists of the Barrier Islands Languages of Sumatra, Indonesia.

The future work is orthography standardisation and CLDF conversion for the complete set of the Barrier Islands Languages Holle List.

References

Rajeg, Gede Primahadi Wijaya. 2023. Digitised, Searchable Holle List in Stokhof (1980). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7972273.

Rajeg, Gede Primahadi Wijaya, I. Wayan Arka, Cokorda Rai Adi Pramartha, and Engga Zakaria Sangian. 2025. “The Data Science Behind the Curation of the Holle List: A Case Study from the Enggano Holle List and Its Neighbouring Barrier Islands Languages.” Presentation presented at the Oceanic and Southeast Asian Navigators (OCSEAN) Conference, Faculty of Humanities, Udayana University. https://doi.org/10.25446/oxford.29625407.v1.

Stokhof, W. A. L., ed. 1980. Holle Lists, Vocabularies in Languages of Indonesia, Vol. 1: Introductory Volume. Vol. Materials in Languages of Indonesia. Canberra, A.C.T., Australia: Dept. of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University. https://core.ac.uk/reader/159464813.

Stokhof, W. A. L., and Alma E. Almanar. 1987. Holle Lists, Vocabularies in Languages of Indonesia, Vol. 10/3: Islands Off the West Coast of Sumatra. Vol. Materials in Languages of Indonesia. Pacific Linguistics (Series d) 76. Canberra, A.C.T., Australia: Dept. of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/144589.