The Bidayuh Language Yesterday, Today and ... - SIL International

Language consultants from SIL working for the BLDP visited various regions of the Bidayuh belt in
2001. Much of that year was spent in the collection and phonological analysis of wordlists of various
Bidayuh dialects. Based on this, a prototype unified Bidayuh orthography was put forth at the end of
2001 (see next section).
After this, phonological analysis continued on the Bidayuh dialects in all their rich variety. Some of
the results of that analysis can be seen in the parts of this volume written by Calvin R. Rensch and
Carolyn M. Rensch. Much remains to be explored.
Meanwhile, other SIL researchers did some analysis of the grammar of some Bidayuh dialects. A
grammar sketch of the Jagoi dialect (Bau District) has been written up, but is not yet ready for
publication (Vega and Vega 2003). However, further work was done on one of the most interesting
aspects of Jagoi grammar that was discovered: Jagoi, and also Singai, has special intensifier words,
unique for each adjective, that have lost all their independent meaning. This was compared with the
Bukar dialect in Serian District, where no such phenomenon was found. However, Bukar does display a
wide range of meanings when adjectives are reduplicated or repeated. The findings on these two dialects
were written up and presented in 2005, at the conference held to commemorate Chalmers’ pioneering
dictionary of Biatah (Vega and Tan 2005).
5.3.2 A unified Bidayuh orthography
A proposal for a unified orthography was put forward in November 2001. The proposal was publicized
throughout the Bidayuh belt by means of an orthography promotion workshop conducted on 15–16
March 2002. It served as a public launch of the unified orthography. About 100 participants from all the
Bidayuh regions attended the workshop. They expressed support for the unified orthography and were
also supportive of the further development of the Bidayuh language.
The orthography was further tested and refined in the early months of 2003 with groups in the
different districts. Then, two orthography consultation sessions, with representatives from all Bidayuh
regions, were held in July and August 2003. A consensus for a unified orthography for all Bidayuh
dialects was finally reached on 10 August, 2003. This is an achievement which has long been awaited by
our community. With this success, all the dialects that collectively make up the Bidayuh Language
(except for Salako and Rara) now have a similar spelling system.
As it turned out, there was little difficulty in agreeing on the symbols for most of the unified Bidayuh
alphabet. The symbolization of consonants was nearly the same for all the dialects, and so emerged
mostly unchanged. The most important change is the symbolization of the formerly ignored glottal stop
by ‘ ' ’. However, as Table 3 shows, there have been much larger differences in the symbolization of the
vowels, since they are pronounced differently by different dialects. Even so, rapid agreement was
reached on all the vowels but one—the high central vowel (second to last in the table). The entire second
session of the orthography consultation was given to arguing the pros and cons of the various possible
symbols for this vowel. Finally, the symbol ‘ŭ’, which has a strong tradition in some areas, was decided
upon.
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