Documenting Yupna Diversity: Linguistic, Sociolinguistic & Sociocultural Perspectives on Variation in a Papuan Language Family
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 project documents the dialects and languages spoken in a portion of the Yupna region, an area of extreme linguistic diversity within one of the most linguistically diverse countries on earth, Papua New Guinea. Although multilingualism has been an everyday fact of life in these communities, state schooling is drastically reducing local linguistic diversity. Through linguistic elicitation, interviews, and recording of interactional events, the project captures a cross-section of the variation found in a set of neighboring villages where four related languages are spoken: Bonkiman (150 speakers), Yuwong (100 speakers), Domung (2,000 speakers), and Yopno (8,000 speakers).
Primary investigator: James Slotta
Project Details
Location: Papua New Guinea, Melanesia, Oceania
Organiser(s):
Endangered Languages Documentation Programme
Project partner(s): University of California, San Diego
Funder(s):
Arcadia
Funding received: £83,166.00
Commencement Date: 01/2009
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