Stories from the Saltwater as told by the old Marra ladies
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.
There are five elderly Marra (lSO:mec, location: -15/135.5)speakers who are defying language shift in the Roper River region of Northern Australia, where all other Marra people now use Kriol, an English-based creole, as a lingua franca. This project will capture stories in Marra, translated into Kriol and English, about the lives of these last Marra speakers and their traditional knowledge. The project is truly collaborative and will create an ethnographically oriented canon of trilingual texts representing Marra people and traditional lifestyles. It will be of significant cultural and educational value to Marra people and inform important inguistic research.
Primary investigator: Greg Dickson
Project Details
Location: Australia, Australia and New Zealand, Oceania
Organiser(s):
Endangered Languages Documentation Programme
Project partner(s): Australian National University
Funder(s):
Arcadia
Funding received: £8,500.00
Commencement Date: 01/2006
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