This paper examines a series of voice alternations in Kelabit, a Western Austronesian language of Northern Sarawak. Traditionally, Western Austronesian languages are subcategorised into ‘Philippine‐type’ and ‘Indonesian‐type’ on the basis of shared structural properties. This paper raises the question, however, of whether a two‐way typology is sufficient to represent the variation within Austronesian voice systems. This comes in light of Aldridge's () claim that Western Austronesian languages have undergone a change from ergative to accusative alignment. If this is the case, we would expect to find evidence of intermediate stages in the transition. Consequently, an independent methodology for studying voice and alignment is proposed and applied to the Kelabit voice system. Comparing voices on morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels yields some interesting findings. Firstly, it suggests that the Kelabit voice‐system could represent a transition from ergative to accusative via the reanalysis of an antipassive construction as active voice. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it suggests the two‐way typology is too narrow to capture all of the distinctions in Austronesian voice systems. Thus extending such an approach to the study of Austronesian voice more generally could prove significant when addressing wider questions, such as the theory of alignment shift.

Kelabit is a Western Austronesian language spoken in Northern Sarawak, Malaysia. This paper provides a guide to the Kelabit documentation project, contextualising the materials collected, and discussing the research methods used. It is hoped that this will make the project outputs more accessible and provide a useful reference for researchers and communities looking to document similar phenomena in related languages.

In this paper, we propose treating alignment shift as a process of functional markedness reversal in the domain of semantically transitive constructions. We illustrate how this approach allows us to capture similarities between the alignment shifts in Eskimo-Aleut and Western Austronesian languages, despite morphosyntactic differences in their voice systems. Using three diagnostics of functional markedness (semantic transitivity, topic continuity of P, and discourse frequency), we compare antipassive and ergative constructions in Eskimo-Aleut varieties and actor voice (av) and undergoer voice (uv) constructions in Western Austronesian varieties. We argue that ergative alignment is equivalent to a functionally unmarked P-prominent construction (e.g., ergative, uv), whilst accusative alignment is equivalent to a functionally unmarked A-prominent construction (e.g., antipassive, av). On this basis, we claim that both language groups are undergoing a parallel shift from ergative to accusative, since A-prominent constructions are functionally marked in more conservative varieties, but lose their functionally marked character and begin to function as unmarked transitive constructions in more innovative varieties.

This paper presents the Actor Voice (av) construction in Kelabit, a Western Austronesian language spoken in Northern Sarawak, Malaysia. It compares Kelabit av with prototypical antipassives and related constructions in the more conservative Western Austronesian languages, using case studies of West Greenlandic and Tagalog. On the basis of morphosyntactic, semantic and discourse diagnostics, the paper demonstrates that Tagalog av constructions have the semantic and discourse characteristics of antipassives but are syntactically transitive. In contrast, Kelabit av, which is also syntactically transitive, has a mixture of semantic and discourse properties: some antipassive-like but many active-like. This has important implications for Western Austronesian and the theory of alignment shift, as well as the ways in which antipassives vary and change over time.

Language Landscape (LL) is a non-profit organization set up by a group of postgraduate linguistics students in 2011. It comprises of an interactive online map (languagelandscape.org), which is the main focus of this article, and educational outreach projects. The LL Mapping model relies not on representing languages per se, but rather on using instances of language use as data points. This method can be particularly useful for mapping language variation and multilingualism, especially in urban contexts. Through digitization, LL reaches a wide audience of educators, primary and secondary school students, university students, academic researchers, minority and endangered language communities and finally, social media users.