I'm an assistant professor (UK: associate senior lecturer, SE: biträdande universitetslektor, NL: universitair docent) at Uppsala University. I'm an expert on Kalamang (Papuan) and Uruangnirin (Austronesian), the languages spoken on the Karas Islands in eastern Indonesia. I have also collected data on other Austronesian languages of eastern Indonesia: Geser-Gorom, Onim, and Yamdena. From 2027, I'll be leading an ERC-funded project called Automating Language Documentation, where the main goal is to create safe and user-friendly workflows to integrate LLMs in the language documentation process.
Until mid 2026, I led a project called Mapping Bomberai, which aimed to collect data on the understudied languages of that peninsula. For outputs, see below.
I support speakers of Wancho (a Tibeto-Burman language) to document their language and dialectal variation.
I once had a side-project on Dutch multi-ethnolect as used in hip-hop lyrics. A database with 6,695 lyrics is available on OSF.
My PhD is from Lund University (Sweden), for which I wrote a grammar of Kalamang, a Papuan language of eastern Indonesia. I also created a dictionary and an corpus.
Contact: firstname dot lastname at lingfil.uu.se |
ORCID |
University Profile
Automating Language Documentation (2027–2032)
More info in the course of autumn 2026.
Mapping Bomberai (2024–2026)
In this project, I coordinated data collection on the understudied languages of the Bomberai peninsula. It was financed by the Wenner-Gren Foundations with administrative support from Uppsala University and the Center for Endangered Languages Documentation in Manokwari, Indonesia. A volume with our findings, edited by Sune Gregersen, is in preparation and will appear in 2027.
| Collaborator | Language | Outputs |
|---|---|---|
| Pietro Milano | Arguni [agf] | MA thesis, corpus |
| Dendi Wijaya | Sekar [skz] | corpus |
| Eline Visser | Uruangnirin [urn] | corpus |
| Artúr Stickl | (South) Kamrau | corpus |
| Tilda Jacobson Holmström | Bedoanas, Erokwanas [bed, erw] | Currently processing |
| John Pattipeiluhu | Geser-Gorom [ges] (Goran island) | corpus |
| Sune Gregersen | Mbaham [bdw] | Postdoc 2025–2027 |
| Hannes Burman | Kemberano [bzp] | Currently processing |
| Konstantin Henke | Kokoda [xod] | Currently processing |
| Johan Wijk | Buruwai [asi] | Currently processing |
Other Bomberai languages studied but not funded by Mapping Bomberai: Iha (Katherine Walker), Koiwai (Dendi Wijaya), Mor (Harald Hammarström), and Sumuri/Tanahmerah (Freja Lindgren).
Publications
Monographs
The two Kalamang grammars are not very different, but please use the 2022 version for the most up-to-date analyses.
- 2026. Eline Visser. Life and death on Karas: Ten Uruangnirin texts. Berlin: Language Science Press.
- 2022. Eline Visser. A grammar of Kalamang. Berlin: Language Science Press.
- 2020. Eline Visser. A grammar of Kalamang, the Papuan language of the Karas Islands. PhD dissertation, Lund University.
Articles & Book Chapters
- forthcoming. Eline Visser. Kalamang. In Nicholas Evans and Sebastian Fedden (eds.), Oxford Guide to the Papuan languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- 2026. Eline Visser. A grammar sketch of Uruangnirin. JSEALS 19(1): clv--cxcii.
- 2025. Pegah Faghiri and Eline Visser. Uruangnirin subject realization. STUF-Language Typology and Universals 78(4), 573--606.
- 2025. Eline Visser. Negation in Kalamang. In Matti Miestamo and Ljuba Veselinova (eds.), Negation in the world's languages III: Papunesia, Australia, and the Americas. Berlin: Language Science Press.
- 2025. Eline Visser and Artúr Stickl. Uruangnirin phonology sketch. JSEALS 18(2): xxiii--lxiv.
- 2025. Eline Visser. Form and frequency of Kalamang fillers. In Brigitte Pakendorf and Françoise Rose (eds.), Fillers. Hesitatives and placeholders. Berlin: Language Science Press.
- 2024. Eline Visser. Uruangnirin language snapshot. Language Documentation and Description.
- 2024. Eline Visser. A grammar sketch of Yamdena and an introduction to its corpus. Language Documentation & Conservation 18: 67--108.
- 2024. Eline Visser. The money-defecating cow and other stories: The structure of Kalamang narratives. In Aone van Engelenhoven (ed.), Oral Traditions in Insular Southeast Asia: Lokaswara Nusantara. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
- 2023. Eline Visser. Yamdena (im)perfectivity: the interplay between legacy material and fieldwork. Semantic Fieldwork Methods 5(1).
- 2021. Marian Klamer, Owen Edwards, Hanna Fricke, Zoi Gialitaki, Francesca Moro, Axel Palmér, George Saad, Yunus Sulistyono, Eline Visser, and Jiang Wu. Practicalities of language data collection and management in and around Indonesia. Wacana 22(2), 467-521.
- 2021. Eline Visser. Of mace and monkeys: Kalamang texts. Texts in the Languages of the Pacific 2.
- 2020. Eline Visser. Tracking and recognitional use of Kalamang opa, demonstrative of cognitive accessibility. In Åshild Næss, Anna Margetts, and Yvonne Treis (eds.), Demonstratives in discourse, 103-121. Berlin: Language Science Press.
- 2020. Marieke Olthof, Eva van Lier, Tjeu Claessen, Swintha Danielsen, Katharina Haude, Nico Lehmann, Maarten Mous, Elisabeth Verhoeven, Eline Visser, Marine Vuillermet, and Arok Wolvengrey. Verb-based restrictions on noun incorporation across languages. Linguistic Typology 24(2), 211-256.
- 2015. Eline Visser. Tensed evidentials: a typological study. Linguistic Typology 19(2), 279-325.
Conference proceedings
- 2026. Luke Gessler, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Sandra Auderset, Timotheus Bodt, Shobhana Chelliah, Sebastien Christian, Maxime Fily, Santiago Herrera, Eva Huber, Sharid Loaiciga, Marieke Meelen, Robert Östling, Alexis Palmer, and Eline Visser. The Missing Middle: Language Documentation Needs Better Infrastructure, Not Better Models. In Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages (ComputEL-9), 136-147.
- 2024. Garrett Tanzer, Mirac Suzgun, Eline Visser, Dan Jurafsky and Luke Melas-Kyriazi. Benchmark for Learning to Translate a New Language from One Grammar Book. In The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations.
- 2022. Lyskawa, Paulina, Jade Sandsted, Eline Visser, Nathan Young, & Björn Lundquist. Successes and shortcomings of phonological accounts of Scandinavian object shift. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 7(1), 5261.
Corpora & Datasets
Uruangnirin
- 2025. Eline Visser. Multi-CAST Uruangnirin. In Haig, Geoffrey and Stefan Schnell (eds.). Multi-CAST: Multilingual corpus of annotated spoken texts. texts | audio
- 2023. Eline Visser, Kamal Kanabaraf, Rustam Kanabaraf, Salis Maswatu Kanabaraf, and Safrudin Tianotak. Uruangnirin language documentation. Endangered Languages Archive.
- 2020. Eline Visser. Uruangnirin collection. Lund University Humanities Lab.
Yamdena
- 2023. Eline Visser. The Yamdena language corpus. Lund University Humanities Lab.
Kalamang
- 2021. Eline Visser. Multi-CAST Kalamang. In Haig, Geoffrey and Stefan Schnell (eds.). Multi-CAST: Multilingual corpus of annotated spoken texts. texts | audio
- 2020. Eline Visser. The Kalamang collection: an archive of linguistic and cultural material from Karas. Lund University Humanities Lab.
Geser-Gorom
- 2020. Eline Visser. Geser-Gorom collection. Lund University Humanities Lab.
- 2019. Eline Visser. Geser-Gorom collection. The Language Archive.
Dictionaries & Word Lists
- 2021. Eline Visser. Kalamang - IDS word list. In Key, Mary Ritchie & Bernard Comrie (eds.). The Intercontinental Dictionary Series. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- 2020. Eline Visser. Kalamang dictionary. Dictionaria 13.
- 2020. Eline Visser. Kalamang dictionary (archived version). PARADISEC catalog.
- 2019. Eline Visser. Uruangnirin (comparative word list). In Gereon A. Kaiping, Owen Edwards, and Marian Klamer (eds.). LexiRumah 3.0.0. Leiden: Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.
- 2019. Eline Visser. Geser-Gorom (comparative word list). In Gereon A. Kaiping, Owen Edwards, and Marian Klamer (eds.). LexiRumah 3.0.0. Leiden: Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.
- 2018. Eline Visser. Kalamang (comparative word list). In Gereon A. Kaiping, Owen Edwards, and Marian Klamer (eds.). LexiRumah 3.0.0. Leiden: Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.
Publications Directed at Community Members
- 2023. Eline Visser. Kamus bahasa Wangniring. [Wangniring dictionary.] Free mobile phone app with 1,800 Uruangnirin lemmas, Papuan Malay translations, example sentences, and 360 pictures. Made with SIL's Dictionary App Builder.
- 2021. Eline Visser. Kamus bahasa Kalamang. [Kalamang dictionary.] Free mobile phone app with 3,800 Kalamang lemmas, Indonesian/English translations, example sentences, and 600+ pictures. Made with SIL's Dictionary App Builder.
- 2019. Eline Visser, Fajaria Yarkuran, and Kamaruddin Gusek. Kuawi. Dongeng bahasa Kalamang. [Kuawi. A Kalamang tale.] Children's book illustrated by Kalamang school children. Distributed in Mas, Karas, Indonesia. Self-published.
Selected Presentations
- 2025. Eline Visser. Leveraging LLMs for language documentation. Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics conference (APLL 17). Cologne.
- 2023. Eline Visser. Linguistic fieldwork in eastern Indonesia. 3rd International Virtual Seminar on Endangered Language and Linguistics (IVSoELL). Medan, Indonesia. slides
- 2023. Eline Visser. Differential subject marking in Uruangnirin. Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics conference (APLL 15). Olomouc.
- 2022. Eline Visser. Investigating Yamdena verbal inflection without doing fieldwork – successes and shortcomings. Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics conference (APLL 14). Berlin. | slides
- 2022. Eline Visser. Digitalizing legacy material: lessons from Yamdena (Southeast Maluku). SEALS 31. Hawaii. | slides
- 2021. Eline Visser. Examples: how to get them, how they are used by others. Descriptive Grammar & Typology II. Paris. slides
- 2019. Eline Visser. ELAN - FLEx - ELAN. Uppladoc Workshop on language documentation. Uppsala University, Uppsala. slides | supplementary materials
(All talks about Kalamang 2015–2020 have been superseded by the grammar.)