Research
Between 1882-1894 five ‘sketch maps’ of the languages of Indonesia (Java, Sumatra, Bangka and the Riau Islands, the Lesser Sunda Islands, Celebes) were designed by the multi-talented tea planter and colonial adviser Karel Holle (1829-1896). They were published with the annual Koloniaal Verslag, a statistics report to Dutch Parliament. On these maps the languages, dialects, and language areas of these islands are indicated in different colours, following the design of Robert Needham Cust’s Sketch of the Modern Languages of the East Indies (1878). Holle’s maps give a (simplified) visual overview of language variety in the Dutch East Indies, and by implication, of ethnic groups and divides, as far as known from his sources. During the fellowship Floris Solleveld will research how these maps represent the state of linguistic knowledge about Indonesia, and what they reveal about the influence of Dutch colonialism on language standardization, language change, and identity formation.
Fellow
Floris Solleveld is a historian with an MA in philosophy, specialising in the cultural history of science. His Ph.D. thesis (Nijmegen, 2018) was a study of the transformation of Enlightenment scholarship into the humanities in the 19th century. As a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, he studied the mapping of the world’s languages and peoples in the colonial era; he is currently a research associate at the University of Bristol, working on a larger AHRC/DFG project on global missionary translation networks.