A Documentation of Orkon/Fanbak, a language of Vanuatu
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.
A documentation and description of the highly endangered language of Orkon/Fanbak. With around 30 active speakers of varying fluency, Orkon/Fanbak was originally spoken in the two villages of Orkon and Fanbak on the eastern coast of Ambrym and comprised of two dialects. These villages are no longer inhabited and the speech community is now highly fragmented and dispersed throughout the dominant North Ambrym language area. The documentation consists of a grammar sketch, a corpus of texts from different speech genres, and a detailed sociolinguistic study of social networks and language shift/loss, focussing on how competing background languages affect language use.
Primary investigator: Michael Franjieh
Project Details
Location: Vanuatu, Melanesia, Oceania
Organiser(s):
Endangered Languages Documentation Programme
Project partner(s): University of Newcastle
Funder(s):
Arcadia
Funding received: £140,605.00
Commencement Date: 01/2011
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