The Tasaday Papers

Lobo in 1972

Over the past twenty years or so there have been a number of people who have claimed that the Tasaday were a hoax perpetrated on a gullible public by unscrupulous individuals for profit, political ambition, and/or publicity.This page will take you to three papers that I have written which discuss the linguistic evidence for recognising the Tasaday as a genuine ethnolinguistic group and not a hoax.

These papers are Adobe Acrobat .pdf files. By clicking on one of the titles, an Acrobat Reader will automatically download to your machine to enable you to view it. If you wish to follow links between the cited example sentences in "The Tasaday Tapes" to their sound and transcribed sources from the tapes, open the paper as an .html document by clicking here.

Titles

THE TASADAY LANGUAGE: A KEY TO TASADAY PREHISTORY.
In: Thomas N. Headland, Ed., The Tasaday controversy: an assessment of the evidence. American Anthropological Association Special Publications, Scholarly Series. 1992.

ANOTHER LOOK AT THE LANGUAGE OF THE TASADAY
Keynote address, The Third Annual Conference of the Southeast Asian Linguistic Society. Honolulu, Hawai'i. May, 7, 1993.

THE TASADAY TAPES
In: Pan-Asiatic Linguistics, Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Languages and Linguistics, Vol. 5. Pp. 1743-1766. Salaya, Thailand: Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development, Mahidol University at Salaya. 1996.

LINGUISTIC ARCHAEOLOGY: TRACKING DOWN THE TASADAY LANGUAGE
In: Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs, Eds. Archaeology and Language 1: Theoretical and Methodological Orientations. 184-208. London and New York: Routledge. 1997.