Documentation of Sian, an endangered language of Borneo
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.
Sian (Sihan) is a severely endangered language spoken by a formerly nomadic community in one village along the Menamang river in Sarawak, Malaysia. The number of speakers of Sian is less than 250. This project aims to document traditional narratives, healing songs, epic poems, hunting and foraging practices and a wide variety of naturally occurring speech. Community members will be trained in documentation and description techniques and a transcribed and translated audio-visual corpus will be produced. From this corpus a small Sian-Malay-English thematic dictionary will be created for the purposes of language support.
Primary investigator: Peter Puxon
Project Details
Location:
Organiser(s):
Endangered Languages Documentation Programme
Project partner(s): SOAS, University of London
Funder(s):
Arcadia
Funding received: £9,873.00
Commencement Date: 01/2014
Project Status: Active
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