A modern grammar of Acehnese: some critical observations

Abstract

1. Acehnese, a language spoken in north Sumatra, is, according to the criteria formulated during the National Seminar on Vernacular Languages in Yogyakarta 1976, one of the major vernaculars of Indonesia. It counts over a million speakers and has its own literary tradition. The actual number of speakers ranges between 1.5 and 2 milliori:? Some 40 years after the appearance of the well-known publications of Snouck Hurgronje and Hoesein Djajadiningrat, Cowan published a concise outline of the phonology and morphology of the so-called Banda dialect of Acehnese (Cowan 1981). Durie's 1985 Ph.D. thesis is the first full-fledged grammar of the language. It contains, besides an introduction (pp. 1-8), chapters on phonology (pp. 9-28), morphology (pp. 29-45), verbs (pp. 47-105), nominals (pp. 107-149), epistemological classifiers (pp. 151-168), prepositions (pp. 169-177), clausal syntax (pp. 179-229), and syntax beyond the clause (pp. 231-271), as well as a list of references (pp. 273-278). The author has chosen a dialect of north Aceh (that of the village of Cot Trieng in Bireuen) for his description, for the following reasons: (1) this dialect has become something of a Standard, because it is 'the most uniform and numerous in speakers' and it has 'prestige and importance'; (2) north Aceh people have the reputation of being haloh ('refined, subtle'), which is reflected in the language by a set of status-conditioned pronominal forms; (3) the dialect is syntactically the most complex; and (4) other linguistic work on Acehnese has been done by scholars from north Aceh (Budiman Sulaiman and Abdul Gani Asyik). Durie stresses the fact that in 'Snouck Hurgronje's days' the dialect of Banda Aceh was the most prestigious one, but that today 'Banda dialects' are considered coarse (p. 7). This statement is quite at variance with what