Quite often in a linguist's life, we encounter the most interesting languages by chance. This happened to me in the case of Ulumanda', a long-overlooked language of West Sulawesi, which has a sound system that is very unique in the local context.
Way back in the late nineties, when I stayed for almost two years in Makassar, there was an asrama for students from the Mandar area (at that time, West Sulawesi was still a part of South Sulawesi province), not far from the house where I lived. After I had some elicitation sessions with a Mandar speaker from the Majene area, I wanted to cross-check and expand my data with the asrama students. One of the seniors in the Mandar asrama was friendly enough to support my studies without bureaucratic obstacles, and mentioned to me that one of their inhabitants spoke a rather unusual interior dialect. Other inhabitants made some funny remarks about the strange and "foreign" sound of that "dialect"; I can remember one saying something like that it was not clear yet whether it was derived from French of Korean, or even from some other planet!
I was eventually introduced to a very friendly and helpful 20-year old English language student from Kabira'an, and immediately noted his back articulation of the letter "a" which is so typical when Indonesians do a mock imitation of a Dutch or English accent. This was not really surprising for me, since I had heard the same "dark" vowel "a" from speakers of Pitu Ulunna Salu. The real surprise came in our first elicitation sessions, when I discovered that this Ulumanda' lect has rounded front vowels /ö/ and /ü/, pretty much alike to the rounded front vowels of my German mother tongue. Actually, the occurrence of /ö/ in that area was documented as early as in 1929 by van der Veen, and further by Mills in his 1975 dissertation on South Sulawesi languages; but at that time, I was not aware of that data.
Within a few weeks, I collected sufficient data that allows for an - almost - complete analysis of the phonological history of Ulumanda', especially the feature of pre-velar fronting, which resulted in the current unique sound of present-day Ulumanda'.
For a short overview of the synchronic vowel system of Ulumanda' and its diachronic background, read my online paper at:
http://ezlinguistics.blogspot.de/p/ulumanda-fronting.html.
