Documentation and Description of Eibela and Sonia, two Languages of the Bosavi Watershed

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.

This proposal is for the continued documentation and description of the Eibela language, also called Aimele (ISO-639 AIL), and the commencement of documentation of the closely related Sonia language (ISO-639 SIQ). These two languages are spoken in Lake Campbell, Western Province, Papua New Guinea, where this documentation will take place. The Eibela language had not been extensively described prior to my own PhD research, and Sonia has not been described beyond a cursory word list. Both languages are considered endangered, with each language having approximately 300 speakers, and undergoing language shift within an extremely multilingual environment. Primary investigator: Grant Aiton

Project Details


Location: Papua New Guinea, Melanesia, Oceania Organiser(s): Endangered Languages Documentation Programme Project partner(s): ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL), Australian National University (ANU) Funder(s): Arcadia Funding received: £128,733.00 Commencement Date: 01/2015 Project Status: Active
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