MUSSE

University researcher Steven Bird engaged in fieldwork this year that will help to preserve New Guinea’s threatened local languages.

On study leave, Associate Professor Bird combined university visits and conference trips with fieldwork to collect data in New Guinea to assist in the effort to preserve their many local languages, which are falling out of use as increasing numbers of people converse in Pidgin English.

The project took place during April and June 2009, mostly in the highlands of New Guinea.

“The use of technology in language preservation and analysis was central to the project,” Professor Bird explained. Recently, Olympus has donated 100 of their latest model voice recorders to support the effort.

He gave voice recorders to people in the remotest parts of New Guinea to record narratives, songs, and dialogues in their languages. He focussed specifically on Usarufa, a language spoken by only 1200 people, and no longer being passed on to children.

Associate Professor Bird says people can get a better sense of these languages by using the voice recorders – some of the people had much more or much less knowledge of the language than they claimed to have, and this became clear once they were asked to record a story.

The recordings were made by formulating and then implementing a “basic oral language documentation” procedure, in which recorders are operated by locals, and where they are trained to select interesting stories and provide an oral translation using a second recorder. “They were so excited about it that they recorded every aspect of their daily lives, in addition to the remnants of traditional heritage they could still remember”, Associate Professor Bird says.

He chose to trial the project in New Guinea because of the range of “tonal” languages there, and the number of different languages spoken in what is comparatively a very small area.

Eight hundred distinct languages are spoken in an area about three times the size of Victoria.

The resulting materials are to be stored in a digital archive for long-term preservation and access by students and researchers, housed with the National Research Institution in PNG and at PARADISEC, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures, which conserves endangered materials from the Pacific region, defined broadly to include Oceania and East and Southeast Asia.

And the project is not just limited to the work Professor Bird has accomplished so far.

In collaboration with students from the University of PNG and non-governmental organisations, local students will take the 100 recorders donated by Olympus to their villages to continue making recordings before lodging them with the University for long term preservation and access.

Many other languages are also at risk of being lost as they fall out of common usage, and universities in PNG will incorporate Professor Bird’s system for recording the languages into their coursework, so that over time a comprehensive record of the languages will be built up as students add to the archive.

So although some languages won’t be spoken in future, there will always be a record of them for future generations.