Wilco van den Heuvel
Wilco van den Heuvel studied general linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and accomplished a PhD thesis on the Biak language in 2006. Following a few years in which he focused on Romani linguistics, he participated in a project at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam investigating the Awyu Dumut languages, which led to a number of articles and a publication on the Aghu language in 2016. Nowadays, the author combines teaching of Dutch as a second language with research on Papuan and Austronesian languages.
Yonggom Wambon, a Dumut language of West Papua »
Annotated Texts with Grammar and Vocabulary
Authored by: Wilco van den Heuvel
Publication date: 2025
In this book, the author, Wilco van den Heuvel, intends to make Drabbe’s 1959 description of (Yonggom) Wambon available to a wider scientific public. As such, the book is in line with an earlier reanalysis by the same author of Drabbe’s description of Aghu (1957), which was published in 2016.
In only 45 pages (!), Drabbe managed to present an incredible amount of Yonggom Wambon language data. The current work takes over 400 pages for their re-re-presentation and reanalysis, and includes a 500-items wordlist that Drabbe had written a few years earlier. It attempts both to increase our understanding of the peculiarities of this individual language, and to contribute to our understanding of the past and present of this still very under-documented part of our globe. An area where—as Drabbe foresaw—minority languages are disappearing, giving way to a common (national) language.
The author expresses his gratefulness to Drabbe, for having unravelled some of the complexities of the languages in this area, which, in Drabbe’s words, form ‘an eldorado for the practitioners of general linguistics’, ‘a labyrinth without escape for missionaries’, and—in the author’s words— ‘offer a unique and highly valuable perspective on specific communities in a specific space and time’.
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