Documenting and supporting indigenous languages of Papua New Guinea

The United Nations marked 2022 as the beginning of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, urging the protection of Indigenous languages to improve the lives of those who speak and sign them (What is the IDIL 2022-2032 | UNESCO). Hosting more than 800 indigenous languages (mostly spoken by small-size communities), New Guinea is the world’s hub of linguistic diversity.

Documenting and supporting indigenous languages of Papua New Guinea (PAPULANG) is a project that contributes to mitigating the rapid loss of the world’s linguistic and cultural diversity, by: a) documenting and studying Neme, a minimally-described language of ca. 200 speakers in Papua New Guinea (PNG), and b) building an infrastructure for autodocumentation, helping the Neme community to lead on the preservation of their own language and cultural heritage.

PAPULANG aims to achieve a threefold challenge. First, it will promote Neme as a language of interest for the discipline of linguistics, bringing unique data for studies on typology, sociolinguistics and language change, and contributing to decolonising and internationalising language studies. Second, Neme speakers are willing to preserve their language; the project will support these efforts ‒linked to fostering dignity and identity, community well-being and transmission of biocultural knowledge‒ by documenting and describing the language. Third, it will enhance language activism in the Neme community, as experts and custodians of their language, by collaborating with Neme speakers to build repositories of audiovisual assets. These will include contextualised language excerpts, gestures, oral literature, philosophies, folklore etc., focusing on the community’s own motivations and interests. The project will explore hybrid techniques for documentation and analyses of lesser-resourced languages, encompassing fieldwork, autodocumentation and long-distance collaboration.