Documentation and description of Bitur, a Tirio language of Papua New Guinea, and preliminary investigation of the moribund Abom language
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.
Bitur, one of the severely under-documented Tirio languages, is spoken by approximately 860 people in five villages of Western Province, Papua New Guinea. Abom is a moribund Trans-New Guinea language of the same region spoken by 15 or fewer people. Primary outcomes of this project include audiovisual corpora of transcribed, translated, and interlinearized texts; lexical databases compiled from elicitation and texts; and grammatical descriptions, all of which feed into research objectives including updated genetic classifications of both languages and contributions to linguistic theory. The Bituri people of Upiara village will also be trained and equipped to contribute to documentation efforts.
Primary investigator: Phillip Rogers
Project Details
Location: Papua New Guinea, Melanesia, Oceania
Organiser(s):
Endangered Languages Documentation Programme
Project partner(s): University of California, Santa Barbara
Funder(s):
Arcadia
Funding received: £9,999.00
Commencement Date: 01/2012
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