Jakarta Field Station

Welcome to the Jakarta Field Station!

The Jakarta Field Station is an office and presence in Indonesia who's primary purpose is to collect large corpora of naturalistic language data from across the country, focusing on Language Contact and Language Description.

It was set up in early 1999 by David Gil and Uri Tadmor as a project funded by the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.

The Jakarta office is located on campus at Atma Jaya University in central Jakarta but data is, and has, been collected in the field at various locations across Indonesia and Malaysia. Such places include Jakarta, Bandung, Semarang and Pemalang in Java, Palembang and Riau in Sumatra, Makassar in Sulawesi, Dayak villages in the highlands of East Kalimantan and Sarawak, villages in West Kalimantan, and Ternate in Northern Maluku.

Originally staffed by just three people, the Field Station's operations have evolved and grown and now involve around twenty people in a number of locations across the country.

Data collection and transcription over the years since inception has accelerated. In addition the Field Station now boasts the largest corpus of naturalistic child language data outside of Europe.