Documentation of zapal 'folk stories' in Bunaq, a minority language of West Timor
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.
Bunaq is a Papuan language of the Timor-Alor-Pantar family spoken in central Timor, straddling the border of Indonesian West Timor and independent Timor-Leste. Like other minority languages in this region, Bunaq is losing ground to the national languages, Bahasa Indonesia and Tetun. This project seeks to foster Bunaq traditions amongst the youngest generations of Bunaq speakers by documenting "zapal", an endangered form of oral literature, and feeding the results of the documentation back into the community in the form of readers. These will be distributed to schools and teachers in Lamaknen, the Bunaq speaking area of West Timor, to be used as resources in muatan lokal 'local content curriculum' teaching.
Primary investigator: Antoinette Schapper
Project Details
Location: Indonesia, South-Eastern Asia, Asia
Organiser(s):
Endangered Languages Documentation Programme
Project partner(s): University of Cologne
Funder(s):
Arcadia
Funding received: £9,512.00
Commencement Date: 01/2008
Project Status: Active
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