Yusuf Willem Sawaki

PhD Candidate at Linguistics

Supervisors

• Wayan Arka - Australian National Univesity
• Mark Donohue - Australian National University
• Nick Evans - Australian National University
• David Gil - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
• Nikolaus Himmelmann - University of Munster

Biographical Statement

I am originally from West Papua. I am currently doing my PhD in Linguistics at Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS), Australian National University and am working on a descriptive grammar of Wooi, an Austronesian language of Yapen Island, West New Guinea.

I currently work for State University of Papua in Manokwari, West Papua teaching and supervising linguistic students of Faculty of Letters. I have been working there since 2003.

My first encounter to the linguistic field was in 1996 when I worked on the Central Yali language, a Papuan language of Great Dani family spoken in the central highland of Western New Guinea for my undergradute paper. I then have been working on the language since then. In 2007, I decided to work on Wooi for my PhD thesis due to an efficiency of timing and planning for collaboration between the Wooi documentation project and the PhD program.

Currently, I am setting a sustainable center for language documentation, which is called ‘Center for Endangered Languages Documentation in Papua’ funded by Volkswagen Foundation. Now, the center is working on documenting Wooi and Iha for the next three years (2009-2011).

Research Interest

• Descriptive Linguistics
• Linguistic Typology
• Sociolinguistics
• Austronesian and Papuan Languages
• Language Documentation

Research Papers

• Mark Donohue and Yusuf Sawaki. Papuan Malay Pronominals: Forms and Functions. In the Oceanic Linguistics, vol. 46, 1. June 2007. University of Hawaii at Manoa
.
• Yusuf Sawaki. Forms and Functions of Pronominals in Middle Yali. In Linguistika, vol. 14, 27. September 2007. Universitas Udayana, Denpasar, Bali
• Person Marking Systems in Dani languages. A paper presented at ALT 6 International conference, July 24-27 July 2005, Padang, West Sumatera, Indonesia
.
• Morphological verb configuration in Middle Yali. A Paper presented in the Workshop on languages of Papua, August 8-10, 2007 in Manokwari, Indonesia
.