Taking my cue from anthropological work on the problems of importing Western concepts to explain Papua New Guineans’ beliefs and behaviour, I ask whether what people speak and transact throughout the area can appropriately be called “languages”. Early work on linguistic classification seemed baffled that “It is rare for speakers of Papuan languages to have a name for themselves, in their own language, as a linguistic unit” (Laycock and Voorhoeve 1971:509). I will take this bafflement seriously and ask whether we perhaps may not be getting sidetracked or misled by our expectations that Papua New Guineans have what we think of as “languages”.
Narratives, such as folktales or life history, are among the most commonly collected types of data in language documentation. They showcase the culture, history, and values of the speakers and are therefore a highly valuable resource for both researchers and the speakers themselves. This presentation introduces an initiative to archive narratives from various indigenous languages in eastern Indonesia, including both Austronesian and Papuan languages, and to publish them through a website.
The website provides access to audio, text, and annotations through the upload of ELAN files. Texts can be published even without complete annotations, as long as a basic transcription or a rough translation is provided. This allows data to be shared early in the research process, enabling collaborative annotation.
The website is available in three languages—Indonesian, English, and Japanese—and each text includes glosses and translations in all three languages or one or two, depending on their availability. The website is designed to let users choose which elements to display (e.g., the original text only, or only the Indonesian translation). This flexibility makes the platform accessible not only to researchers but also to speakers of the indigenous language and non-academic audiences, such as Japanese students interested in Indonesian culture.
A distinctive aspect of this initiative is the use of a university institutional repository, separate from the website, for the sustainable storage of audio and text data. Metadata from the repository is supplied to external databases, and in the future, we aim to integrate the text metadata into OLAC.
Since 2003, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) has been engaged in a variety of efforts to enable better access to language and music records, typically created in the course of a research project (Thieberger and Harris 2022). In the past, these records were often lost, or were inaccessible in the hands of the researcher until their retirement.
Languages of PNG, as a key location for Australian linguists, are well represented in PARADISEC, and the resulting field materials were a major motivation for the work PARADISEC has been doing for 21 years. As with many research projects, there was no provision for longterm curation of primary records when fieldwork was undertaken in the 1950s and later. In fact, it is still regrettably the case that much field recording is not being archived.
In this presentation I will outline what Papuan material is in PARADISEC, how some of the collections came to be there, and what can be done for future work to ensure that it is both safely archived and, as much as possible, made accessible to the people recorded. I will outline the way in which corpora of a range of languages were created for the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (2014-2022), and subsequently archived for future use.
References
Thieberger, Nick & Amanda Harris. 2022. When Your Data is My Grandparents Singing. Digitisation and Access for Cultural Records, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC). Data Science Journal, 21: 9, pp. 1–7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-009
Petrus Drabbe was a Roman Catholic priest, who lived in New Guinea from 1935 till 1960. In this period he produced language descriptions of over a dozen languages. Drabbe was an outstanding scholar, with a fine eye for the own ‘peculiarity’ of individual languages. Most of Drabbe’s language descriptions consist of a text collection, grammatical introduction and wordlists.
In my talk, I will illustrate how some of Drabbe’s works, written in Dutch, within a framework shaped by his education in the classical languages, have been transposed to descriptions within a modern linguistic framework and been made accessible to whoever knows English and has access to the internet. At the same time, I will also discuss the question of what else has been done and could be done to make these works even more accessible, both to local speakers and to linguists. One of the possible ways to achieve this is to integrate these open access works in archives for language documentation like ELAR, Paradisec, or TLA, along with data from more or less recent surveys, grammar sketches and lexical data. A growing number of language archives encourage depositors to translate both the data and the metadata into a local wider language of communication (in this case: Papuan Malay), which makes the archived language materials available not only to the English speaking community, but also to the community of the speakers of those languages.
The Mee is one of the non-Austronesian languages (commonly referred to as Papuan languages) spoken in Papua Province, Indonesia, on the western part of the island of New Guinea. While speakers of the language refer to it as the Mee language, it is more widely known externally as Ekari (Shiohara & Nawipa 2019). It is spoken in the highlands of the westernmost part of New Guinea Island, in Papua Province, Indonesia, with an estimated 100,000 speakers as of 1985 (Ethnologue).
Since the 1950s, linguistic descriptions of the Mee language have been documented (Drabbe 1952), and while not systematic, comprehensive grammatical descriptions have also been conducted, as seen in works such as Shiohara & Nawipa (2019). Furthermore, it can be said that research on specific topics within the language has continued relatively actively up to the present (Marquardt et al. 2018; Staroverov & Tebay 2022). The Papua provincial government has also been engaged in language preservation efforts, including the Mee language, and in collaboration with SIL, developed picture-story-style reading materials in 2016.
While younger generations can understand the language, they often feel uncomfortable speaking it, highlighting the need for more educational materials to support language learning. In response to these circumstances, this presentation aims to propose a Mee language text that includes grammatical and lexical information. Specifically, it will report on the creation of educational materials covering various grammatical topics and the development of a reading text with added grammatical annotations, based on one of the narratives from the previously mentioned materials and Shiohara & Nawipa (2019).
A vital part of documenting and analysing Papuan languages is the production of transcripts that reflect as closely as possible what is uttered in the audio-visual recordings they accompany. However, a language community may be more interested in an edited text, in which various features of naturalistic speech are removed or replaced. Such features may include hesitations and false starts, along with lexical items, morpho-syntactic structures, and discourse-structuring devices.
In this talk, I discuss how working with language consultants to produce edited text versions of oral narratives has the dual benefit of providing both a record for the community and insight for linguists into language-specific, regional, and universal features of oral versus edited narratives.
It is well known that New Guinea (and its surrounding islands) is one of the world linguistically most diverse areas in the world. The mere quantity of languages alone poses a huge challenge to the field of documentary and descriptive linguistics, and it is exacerbated by the time pressure imposed by the endangerment scenarios we find in many speech communities of New Guinea. It is therefore crucial to involve as many stakeholders as possible in the endeavour of documenting (and preserving) the linguistic heritage of this part of the world.
In this talk, we focus on the western part of the Island, i.e. on West Papua. In the first part of our talk, we will point towards the areas where documentation is most urgently needed and/or that lack linguistic work. In the second part, we discuss different measure and workable procedures for multiplying the stakeholders involved in language documentation, with a special focus on the active participation of local (linguistics) students.
We do this from two perspectives: Fist, from an ‘insider’s perspective’, i.e., from the perspective of a lecturer and researcher at a Papuan university, who supervises local students and who leads the country’s only language documentation centre. Here we will also discuss, on the one hand, how language description can be integrated in the curriculum of the university’s linguistics programme, and on the other hand, how language documentation is supported at the Centre for Endangered Languages Documentation (CELD). Second, we present some possible measures from an ‘outsider’s perspective’, i.e., from the perspective of a foreign researcher who is dedicated to support Papuan linguistic infrastructure and personnel with training and third party funding. Here we showcase how local students can be integrated into a team of international researchers in an interdisciplinary research project.
The Onnele Goiniri people plan to move back to their traditional homeland, ‘Place-Where-They-Sing’. This move represents their embrace of vernacular as a connection to their history, land, identity, and relationships. Four Onnele dialects (Northern One [onr]), with ten unrelated languages in Sandaun Province, PNG, have partnered with SIL on their own language development priorities since 2001. With limited resources in this linguistically diverse region, quality is maintained through innovative strategies appropriate for Melanesian learning styles. This cluster program facilitates PNG citizens leading in their own sustainable language goals through consensus discussions. As a ‘collaborative cohort’, local practitioners regularly work together on shared tasks, and learn through observation, trial and error. A primary planned outcome is people: local vernacular experts equipped through cyclical training opportunities. Papuan peoples are increasingly dissatisfied with loss of language, culture, and community. Solutions that help address the current malaise include: utilising multilingual tools, breaking down barriers to collaboration through Bible translation, and valuing long-term interdependence between linguists and vernacular communities for research and training. Seeking to strengthen vernacular, people often ridicule intrusions from Tok Pisin or English. Don’t laugh! Borrowing and code switching are signs of life, and ridicule is a sure path to language death.
The first students of Greater Awyu languages of West Papua generally did not know these languages well enough to understand key aspects of metalanguage, that is Greater Awyu expressions used to talk about language in general, to talk about and refer to their own languages, those of their neighbors and those of foreigners (Van Enk and de Vries 1997, De Vries 2020). Yet such knowledge formed a key to understanding local ecologies of unnamed chains of equally unnamed dialects.
This lack of knowledge led to serious and lasting repercussions for grasping both the degree and the nature of linguistic diversity in the area, for understanding specific practices of multilingualism and concomitant linguistic ideologies, for language names, for highly inflated numbers of ‘languages’, for multilingual word lists ascribed to one ‘language’, numbers of speakers per ‘language’, language maps with numerous ‘languages’ as discrete, bounded, spatially defined entities, and for tools like Glottolog and Ethnologue (de Vries 2012).
After sketching Greater Awyu metalanguage practices and the consequences of misreading both metalanguage and the cultural and ecological conditions that informed it (Stasch 2007, 2009), I will discuss implications of these findings for future linguistic research, in terms of methods, goals and priorities, in the study of Greater Awyu languages, and beyond.
References
van Enk, Gerrit J. and Lourens de Vries. (1997). The Korowai of Irian Jaya. Their language in its cultural context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stasch, Rupert. (2007). ‘Demon language. The otherness of Indonesian in a Papuan community.’ In Miki Makihara and Bambi B. Schieffelin (eds.), Consequences of contact: Language, ideology and sociocultural transformations in Pacific societies, 96–124. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stasch, Rupert. (2009). Society of others: Kinship and mourning in a West Papuan place. Berkeley: University of California Press.
de Vries, Lourens. (2012). ‘Speaking of clans: language in Awyu-Ndumut communities of Indonesian West Papua.’ International Journal of the Sociology of Language. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2012-0018
de Vries, Lourens. (2020). The Greater Awyu languages of West Papua. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Before the arrival of missionaries, the linguistic situation surrounding Dom was likely simpler, at least in terms of prestige. With the spread of missionary work, the Kuman language began to be used as a lingua franca and became dominant in the northern part of Simbu Province. Subsequently, Tok Pisin replaced Kuman as the primary lingua franca. Today, Tok Pisin is one of the two languages that Dom speakers acquire naturally. Education is another factor influencing the multilingual environment of the Dom community, but for the time being, English does not appear to pose a significant threat to the Dom language. Rather, the indigenous languages of schools attended by Dom youth may present a greater concern for the maintenance of Dom. Simbu Province, home to several genetically related languages, has the potential to develop a common regional language.
Papuan languages spoken in south and a part of central Bougainville constitute South Bougainville Family (Ross 2001, 2005; Evans 2010). They include: Naasioi, Nagovisi (Sibe), Baitsi, Motuna, Buin (Terei) and Uisai. This paper aims to give an overview of the current socio-linguistic situation of these languages, and of past and current linguistic research conducted on them, including published works, projects, and fieldwork.
This paper discusses our on-going project of archiving the data of the languages of South Bougainville Family in collaboration with PARADISEC. Our project aims to preserve audio and some visual data of these languages recorded in our field work in south Bougainville from 2000 to 2015. Native speakers of younger generations who are willing to inherit their oral tradition are closely involved in transcription and translation of these data. They are keen to create language-teaching materials based on these data. We also aim to archive digitised data of handwritten materials left by Douglas L. Oliver who conducted field research in Bougainville from 1938 to 1939.
Aiku, also known as Yangum Mon (ISO 639-3: ymo), is a Torricelli language spoken by around 130 people in Sandaun Province. Like other Torricelli languages, Aiku is an endangered language and its speakers are gradually shifting to Tok Pisin. Additionally, the Aiku-speaking community has a small number of elderly people, which puts the traditional knowledge of the language at risk of being lost in the near future.
Given this community’s situation, it is necessary to record and document a wide variety of language use, rather than eliciting limited language data for specific research interests. In this talk, I discuss what types of data need to be documented, considering the linguistic properties of Aiku which have been discovered so far, as well as the current situation of the Aiku-speaking community.
In this talk I will provide a reflection on the role of Field Linguistics in relation to the notion of Language Digital Divide (Paolillo 2005). This divide acknowledges a vicious cycle that divides and increasingly separates languages by their presence and readiness in the context of the Digital World. Within it, languages with an already large online presence are rewarded for their presence and create strong barriers to changing the status quo. By definition, a large majority of languages in the world – in particular smaller, less documented languages – are assumed to be on the losing end of this divide. However, this often does not align with the wishes of individual communities – who are driven beyond the perceived low socio-economic interest of their language, and long to see their language preserved and even thrive.
My talk will explore how Digital and Remote Field Linguistics can be used to better prepare smaller languages communities to the challenges of an increasingly digital world. I will discuss two use cases: i) how Wordnets are being used to speed up the documentation of Abui (Papuan); ii) how a chat-bot was employed to aid the documentation and revitalization of Kristang (Portuguese-Malay creole). Through both these use cases I will argue that Field Linguistics has a very important role to play in preparing and supporting communities to take ownership and determine the future of their own languages.
The Woirata are an indigenous group residing on Kisar Island in Southwest Maluku, where they speak Woirata, a Papuan language that belongs to the Timor-Alor-Pantar family. Their language stems from a relatively recent migration from the island of Timor, making Woirata an offshoot of the north-eastern dialect of Fataluku, spoken in East Timor. Surrounded by Austronesian languages, the Woirata language faces significant pressures from external linguistic influences, increasing the possibility of language change. In this context, the Woirata community must navigate challenges to maintain their linguistic and cultural identity while adapting to the sociolinguistic environment around them.
This paper explores the resilience of the Woirata community, focusing on how their language has persisted and adapted amid significant socio-cultural shifts. Drawing on ten years of fieldwork, I will discuss how the community has increasingly turned to digital platforms to maintain communication with their diaspora. For example, the community has created Facebook groups and other social media channels to strengthen ties and share cultural knowledge across distances. Leaders within the Woirata community have also taken the initiative to compile and formalise their language by creating a Woirata dictionary, a vital step in preserving their linguistic heritage. Moreover, the youth have embraced technology by developing a machine translation system, hosted on a dedicated website, to facilitate learning and use of the Woirata language. These technological innovations demonstrate the community’s proactive strategies to sustain their language, while facing external pressures such as modernization and globalisation. By examining these adaptive practices, this study offers insights into the complex interplay between tradition and adaptation in indigenous language communities, highlighting how cultural identity is intertwined with linguistic endurance in the face of change.
Over the past few decades, speaker communities on Yapen island have shifted language use almost exclusively to Papuan Malay. Though Yapen is home to over 13 languages, the interior village Ambaidiru is reportedly the only location on the island where children and adolescents still speak a local language; a variety of the Papuan language Yawa. In villages along the coast, Papuan Malay is used as a language of everyday use, and indigenous languages are often only spoken by those over the age of 40. The rapid shift to Papuan Malay in the last generation has had consequences for the structures of the languages of Yapen; new languages have emerged in the process of shift.
This talk shows how the varieties of Yawa that are spoken in the villages of Turu, Ambaidiru and Kabuena have substantially diversified as a result of this language shift. Whereas only in the 80’s these varieties were still considered—not even too distinct—dialects of Yawa (Jones 1986), today’s speakers report complete unintelligibility between varieties. In this talk, I explore how the recent influence of Papuan Malay has caused the Turu variety to diverge far away from other varieties. I discuss how it has lost its alienability and clusivity distinctions and most of its verbal morphology, and how it is undergoing change from SOV to SVO word order. I also explore the fuzzy borders between L1 attrition, incomplete language learning and actual language change and how these processes are all intertwined in the context of coastal Papua.
References
Jones, Larry B. 1986. The dialects of Yawa. In Jones, L.K., Jones, L.B., Merlan, F., Rumsey, A., Reimer, M., Martin, D. and Oguri, H. editors, Papers in New Guinea Linguistics No. 25, pp. 31-68. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
The literature on the linguistic ecology of New Guinea is full with studies describing widespread early-life multilingualism without shift. That is, Melanesian languages have traditionally been described as being stably passed from generation to generation, even where communities have traditionally been multilingual. Today, the Melanesian pattern of stable multilingualism has been significantly disrupted, with younger community members increasingly dominant in vehicular languages, such as Tok Pisin and Malay. This new dynamic is leading to rapid simplification―that is, loss, reduction or regularization of paradigms, and a preference for certain types of analytical or transparent structures―in many Melanesian languages. Grammar writers of Papuan language can increasingly expect to find simplification and variation in the languages of even small speech communities as shift advances, and transmission of the traditional languages weakens. Today even where fieldworkers are often aware of this kind of language change, age-based variation and shift-induced change rarely makes its way into grammatical descriptions of Papuan languages, with preference typically given to describing conservative varieties of older speakers. In this paper I consider some of the consequences of the rapid language shift in New Guinea and how it will impact the collection of data and writing of grammars for Papuan languages.
The Kui language is a Papuan language spoken on Alor Island, East Nusa Tenggara, a region known as the meeting ground between Papuan and Austronesian language families. The island is home to around one thousand people. This paper discusses the results of a linguistic vitality test of the Kui language and its influence on the vitality of their oral traditions. Using UNESCO's nine factors for assessing language vitality, the Kui language is categorized as endangered. The contributing factors include the spread of the Kui people from their old villages, increasing intermarriage between ethnic groups, past trauma related to language policies in schools, and the widespread use of Alor Malay as a lingua franca. The threat of extinction of the Kui language has a corresponding impact on the threat of extinction of oral traditions, particularly lego-lego, which is the main oral tradition. This is alarming given the oral tradition contains narratives about the origins of the Kui people, the historical journey of their ancestors, life advice, marriage rules, and more. This serves as the basis for debate among the Kui people about the future construction of their ethnic identity.
This talk will present the recent situations of language documentation and description in the Papuan Languages of North Halmahera (NH) and propose the visible projects in the future in order to tackle language endangerment issues faced by the linguistic communities. The talk is based on my own experiences documenting and describing three different NH languages: Pagu, West Makian and Modole in the last two decades (2012 to 2024).
Firstly, I will briefly discuss the recent sociolinguistic conditions of the ten NH Languages: Pagu, Modole, Galela, Tobelo, Tabaru, Loloda, Sahu, Tidore, Ternate, and West Makian. Each of the languages can be said to be endangered due to the pressure from the National language Indonesian, and the lingua franca Local Malay.
Secondly, I will discuss four points from my experiences working with the three communities, including: a) the early stage of the communities’ response to the project (such as opening their awareness on their language endangerment and supporting the projects as an effort to revitalize and save their languages, b) the challenges faced by the projects dealing with the community members (such as their internal conflicts) c) the efforts the communities offered to continue or make new similar projects and the challenges (such as trying to raise money, consolidating among themselves and neighbouring linguistic communities, but certain groups condemn them because they want a better economy first, d) the roles of the linguists they expect (such as becoming the ‘competent’ people to talk to the rest of the communities about the negative impacts of their language endangerment, and with other parties such as the local government, NGOs and industries to support them avoiding losing their language.
Finally, I will close the talk with some recommendations for future projects in the region, including a) community capacity building (such as training them how to document their language in excellent video/audio recordings, transcript them, linguistic analyse and describe them), b) setting MoU with the local government(s), NGOs, industries (and other related parties) and raising money for supporting language documentation projects, and c) ideally a language documentation hub establishment, one that is standby to help the communities dealing with language documentation/revitalization issues including advocating, training, collaborating, finding supports, etc.