The painter's eye, the painter's voice: language, art and landscape in the Gija world

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.

The goal of the project is to document significant aspects of the encyclopaedic knowledge of the natural and cultural world of the Gija, with a focus on the mythological, historical and ecological knowledge associated with sites depicted in artists' paintings, and on the language used to describe paintings, dance and song performance. The results will be a corpus of 60 hours of fully annotated texts recorded on audio or video, and a lexical database of 4,000 entries incorporating photographs and sound, which will also include lexical information from earlier recordings of Gija made by the main researcher, Frances Kofod. Primary investigator: Eva Schultze-Berndt

Project Details


Location: Australia, Australia and New Zealand, Oceania Organiser(s): Endangered Languages Documentation Programme Project partner(s): School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, University of Manchester Funder(s): Arcadia Funding received: £125,290.00 Commencement Date: 01/2004
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