Critical Survey Of Studies On The Languages of Sumatra

Book excerpt: The aim of the critical bibliographies, compiled on the initiative of the Board of Directors of the Royal Institute of Linguistics, Geography and Ethnology, is to draw attention to the data on Indonesian lin~ guistics and cultural sciences collected in the past, and to provide guidance in this field. It so happens that these data were often published in journals with a limited circulation, whilst these journals are only available in a few places. Moreover, most of them are only accessible without difficulty to those workers in the fields of Indonesian linguistics and cultural sciences who possess some knowledge of the Dutch language. Apart from providing information, these bibliographies also have an other object, viz. to prevent that meritorious scholarly work would be lost due to the purely fortuitous circumstance - which, however, in actual practice is unfortunately of decisive importance - that this work is not written in a world language and that it cannot be every where easily consulted. The Board therefore hope at the same time to break with the slightly provincialistic nature which for evident reasons used to be characteristic for the studies in language and culture of Indonesia. The Board hope to be able to prevent that new research should have to start unnecessarily again at the very beginning, and also to contribute to a more rapid progress of scientific research in this field by means of a regular publication of these critical reviews of pubIications.