| Acknowledgements | 13 |
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| Conventions | 14 |
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| List of abbreviations | 16 |
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| Part A: Introduction | 18 |
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| 1. General | 18 |
| 2. Siraya primary sources and linguistic literature | 19 |
| 3. Dialect variation | 21 |
| 4. Some observations about authorship and spelling | 23 |
| 5. Formosan languages: numbers of speakers and vitality | 24 |
| 6. The linguistic classification of Formosan languages | 25 |
| 7. Aboriginal Taiwan and Austronesian prehistory | 26 |
| 8. The Dutch occupation of West Taiwan: historical setting | 27 |
| 9. The Siraya people: some historical and ethnographic data | 29 |
| 10. The Austronesian ethnic groups in the Taiwanese nationalist debate | 30 |
| 11. A probable cause of the extinction of Siraya | 32 |
| 12. Attempts at reviving Siraya | 32 |
| Part B: A grammatical sketch of Siraya | 34 |
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| 1. A near-phonemic orthography | 34 |
| 1.1. Symbols in the Siraya 17th century materials that were maintained | 34 |
| 1.2. Overview of changes made to the 17th century orthography | 34 |
| 1.3. æ is a palatal ä | 35 |
| 1.4. Siraya must have had a schwa | 36 |
| 1.5. e stands for e, ., a, ä or i | 38 |
| 1.6. A re-definition of i, j and y according to the syllabic length that they indicate | 40 |
| 1.6.1. y stands for a short high front vowel i | 41 |
| 1.6.2. i stands for a long high front vowel i except base-finally after e, where it stands for a palatal semivowel | 42 |
| 1.6.3. j stands for a palatal semivowel y and (sometimes) for a high front vowel i | 42 |
| 1.7. ou and o stand for respectively u and o | 44 |
| 1.8. ou and oe represent the same phoneme u | 46 |
| 1.9. u | 48 |
| 1.10. w | 49 |
| 1.11. k and q refer to one single phoneme k | 51 |
| 1.12. c preceding i or y is a sibilant or affricate | c preceding o stands for k51 |
| 1.13. ng¯ | 52 |
| 1.14. z | 53 |
| 1.15. g, gh, hg, ch, and (sometimes) h or ø, stand for a velar fricative x | 54 |
| 1.16. h stands for h, x or 0 | 56 |
| 1.16.1. h is not phonemic in subjunctive markers, in the pronominal suffix -koh, and before voiceless stops | 56 |
| 1.16.2. Other instances of h represent phonemic h | 59 |
| 1.17. No geminate consonants | 60 |
| 1.18. Diacritics | 62 |
| 1.18.1. Apostrophe indicates the (synchronic) deletion or (diachronic) loss of a phoneme | 62 |
| 1.18.2. Dieresis indicates palatal ä | 64 |
| 1.18.3. No circumflex | 65 |
| 1.18.4. Hyphens occur on morpheme boundaries | 66 |
| 2. Siraya phonemics | 67 |
| 2.1. “Phoneme” inventory | 67 |
| 2.2. Discussion of phonemes and phonemic features | 68 |
| 2.2.1. The alternation between initial [b] and [v], and between [d] and [r] | 69 |
| 2.2.2. The alternation between x and h | 72 |
| 2.2.3. Palatalisation | 73 |
| 2.2.4. Metathesis | 75 |
| 2.2.5. Vowel reduction | 75 |
| 3. Reduplication | 77 |
| 3.1. (Historical) monosyllabic root reduplication | 78 |
