Rik De Busser is currently writing a grammar of Takivatan Bunun under the supervision of Professor Randy LaPolla.

Takivatan

Takivatan is a dialect of Bunun, an Austronesian language spoken on the island of Taiwan. The Bunun have around 38,000 ethnic members, but most people under 30 are monolingual Mandarin speakers and only the very old (80+) are still monolingual Bunun. The educational system in schools all over Taiwan – including those in aboriginal areas – is sinicized and younger Bunun only have a passive knowledge of their mother tongue. Presently, all Bunun dialects are threatened by extinction.

There are five extant dialects, Isbukun, Takitudu, Takibaka, Takbanuaz and Takivatan, which are traditionally subdivided in a Northern, a Central and a Southern branch. A sixth, Takipulan, died out in the 1970s.

With 1600 speakers, Takivatan is a minor dialect. It is most closely related to Takbanuaz and is spoken in a handful of small villages in the Central Mountain Range and at the east coast of Taiwan.

Bunun is an agglutinative language with a very rich bound morphology, especially on verbs. Derivational markers are typically prefixal, inflection has a weak tendency to be suffixal. Open word classes include nouns, verbs, adjectives and (maybe) auxiliaries. Closed word classes include personal and demonstrative pronouns, the anaphoric pronoun sia, question words, manner words, time words and prepositions. Takivatan has a Philippine-style voice system (also called a focus system). This basically means that constituent order and cross-referencing on the verb are determined by pragmatic, rather than syntactic factors, with the pragmatically most prominent constituent being cross-referenced on the verb. The unmarked constituent order is the focus equivalent of VAO/VS.

Rik

Rik has a Licentiate in Germanic Languages and Linguistics from the K.U.Leuven in Belgium. From 2000 till 2003, he worked as a computational linguist at ICRI, a research centre at the same university (list of publications here). In December 2003, he decided to leave Belgium and go to Taiwan to study Mandarin at National Cheng Kung University, where he stayed for one and a half years till he joined RCLT in June 2005. According to most people in Taiwan, his most distinctive characteristics are being blond and tall. The Takivatan (who are short and stocky) call him Pian, after a two meter long Bunun giant from the Japanese era.