Description and Documentation of Lelepa, an Endangered Language of Central 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.
Lelepa is spoken by less than 400 people on the island of Lelepa, Vanuatu. It is surrounded by closely related and much larger languages. Both missionisation in the 1800s and recent, rapid urbanization and development have contributed to threatening the language as speakers are shifting to languages of wider communication such as Bislama (an English-lexifier pidgin and national language of Vanuatu) and not transmitting the language to younger generations. This project aims at building a corpus of annotated texts from audio and video recordings to be used as a foundation for a grammatical description and language resources for Lelepa speakers.
Primary investigator: Sebastien Lacrampe
Project Details
Location: Vanuatu, Melanesia, Oceania
Organiser(s):
Endangered Languages Documentation Programme
Project partner(s): Australian National University
Funder(s):
Arcadia
Funding received: £18,613.00
Commencement Date: 01/2009
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