Nicole Kruspe

University of Melbourne

<nkruspe@unimelb.edu.au>

Semaq Beri: A preliminary field report

Semaq Beri is a previously undescribed Aslian language of the Malay Peninsula. It belongs to the Southern Aslian sub-branch and is spoken by a heterogenous group of some 2,300 people in an area that extends north from the Pahang River in the central east of the peninsula, into the mountain range of the north-east. In the south the Semaq Beri reportedly share the settled collector-trader subsistence mode of their Southern Aslian and Aboriginal Malay neighbours, but in the north the Semaq Beri merge into the hunter-gatherer cultural sphere of the Northern Aslian speaking peoples. I will present a preliminary account of Semaq Beri based on recent fieldwork on dialect varieties from these two different cultural/linguistic spheres.