Introduction 1. Situating the Kedang language 1.1. Linguistic grouping Kedang is a language of the Austronesian family spoken by some 29,000 persons living on the eastern end of the island of Lembata in the province of Nusa Tenggara Timur, eastern Indonesia. Until 1989 the language spoken in Kedang (locally called Edang) was essentially unrecorded. In that year a publication by Paulus Sawardo (1989) appeared which was devoted to Kedang phonology, morphology and syntax. This was followed by Samely’s Kedang grammar (1991b) and preceded by Barnes’ ethnographic study (1974). The people of Kedang call their language the language of the mountain or interior, tutuq nanang wela, as opposed to the language of outsiders, principally speakers of the Lamaholot language which is found elsewhere on the island of Lembata and on Solor, Adonara and eastern Flores. Lamaholot is also an Austronesian language, and Fernandez (1988, 1996:43) has linked Kedang, Lamaholot and Sikka (spoken in Sikka on Flores just to the west of the Lamaholot region) to the East Flores language group, as opposed to the West Flores group of Lio, Ngadha and Manggarai. Immediately to the east of Kedang lie the islands of Pantar and Alor. Twelve of the thirteen languages spoken on these islands are non-Austronesian and have affi nities with non-Austronesian languages spoken on parts of Timor, Kisar and the Birdshead Peninsula of Irian Jaya (Stokhof 1977:2-3). The remaining language, called the Alor language, is closely related to Lamaholot. Alor and Lamaholot share 70 per cent of related lexemes, while both have 61 per cent shared cognates with Kedang (Samely 1991b:5). Pampus (1999:41, note 2) 2 Introduction has calculated a proportion of 50 per cent of shared cognates between the Lamaholot dialect spoken in the Lewolema district of East Flores and the Kedang language. Whereas Keraf (1978: Lampiran V) calculated 25 per cent shared vocabulary between Kedang and the Lamaholot spoken in Lamalera, Lembata, Pampus calculated 47 per cent. Indeed, Pampus says that while Kedang is regarded as a separate language within the region, in his opinion it should be considered as a dialect of Lamaholot. This issue depends, of course, on how the difference between a language and a dialect is defi ned. Given the absence of mutual intelligibility and the absence of evidence of a clear dialect chain we regard Lamaholot and Kedang as separate languages. The Austronesian languages of these islands belong to the Central Malayo-Polynesian group, which in turn belongs to the Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian group, which together with various Western Malayo-Polynesian branches, stem from Malayo- Polynesian as opposed to the Austronesian languages of Taiwan (Blust 1993). .