Grammaticalization of <i>kide</i> as a similative marker in Contemporary Enggano

Abstract This paper presents a case study of similatives in Enggano, an Austronesian language spoken in Sumatra, Indonesia. It compares and contrasts the expression of similarity in Old Enggano versus Contemporary Enggano using legacy materials collected in 1930s, and a modern corpus collected since 2018 as part of an ongoing language documentation project. It demonstrates that the Old Enggano verb doo ‘be.similar’ has undergone a number of changes in Contemporary Enggano that are consistent with a process of grammaticalization and argues that this process is facilitated by contact with Indonesian, which provides a template for many of the semantic extensions through its comparison marker seperti . Ultimately, this supports the view that both language internal and language external factors may play a role in the development of similatives.