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
Project owner? Update this project



Related Projects

EAP1402 Pub003

19th-century documents from the Peruvian asylum el Manicomio del Cercado

The Victor Larco Herrera Hospital in the centre of Lima, Peru, was closed in 1917. Its archives, dating back to 1859, consist of medical documentation as well as administrativ…

Explore project
EAP1306 Silk Museum

The Caucasian Silk Circle: Digitising Photo Collection of the State Silk Museum in Georgia

The State Silk Museum of Georgia holds the only documentary evidence of the practice of sericulture in the 19th century. Taken during expeditions of the Caucasian Sericulture …

Explore project
EAP1294 team

Safeguarding for Posterity Two Private Collections of Palm-Leaf Manuscripts from the Tamil Country

The Kalliṭaikuṟicci and Villiyampākkam collections are palm-leaf collections held privately in India. The collections are essential to study the prevalent reading practices in…

Explore project