A comprehensive documentation of Bine - a language of Southern New Guinea

The Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) provides grants worldwide to for the linguistic documentation of endangered language and knowledge. Grantees create multimedia collection of endangered languages. These collections are preserved and made freely available through the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) housed at the library of SOAS University of London.

Bine is an underdescribed language of Southern New Guinea spoken by around 2000 speakers. It belongs to the Eastern Trans-Fly languages, itself largely undocumented.This project provides the first comprehensive documentation of Bine. Specific outcomes of the project are a multipurpose collection of audio-visual recordings, a corpus of 8 hours of transcribed and translated text, a dictionary of 1,500 entries, a grammar sketch of the language, and a series of subtitled short films. The data acquired will be useful to linguists working in comparative linguistics, language description, and typology. Materials will also be created for Bine speakers to preserve their language and teach it to others. Primary investigator: Christian Döhler

Project Details


Location: Papua New Guinea, Melanesia, Oceania Organiser(s): Endangered Languages Documentation Programme Project partner(s): University of Cologne Funder(s): Arcadia Funding received: £142,791.00 Commencement Date: 01/2020 Project Status: Active
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