Documentation of Ponosakan, an Austronesian Language of Sulawesi, Indonesia: Transcription and Translation of Recordings

FAIN: FN-230224-15

Jason W. Lobel
University of Hawaii (Honolulu, HI 96822-2216)

The purpose of this project is to continue the PI’s work documenting and preserving Ponosakan, an Austronesian language spoken in northern Sulawesi, Indonesia. Once the majority language throughout the town of Belang, Ponosakan has long since been fully supplanted by regional lingua franca Melayu Manado. There are now only four surviving speakers who are communicatively-competent, ages 70, 80, 86, and 90, and all four have signed a letter expressing their willingness to continue working on this project.  The only scholar to have conducted ongoing language research on Ponosakan, the PI has made several trips to Belang over the past eight years, assessing the competency of the remaining speakers, eliciting wordlists and sentences, building a lexical database, and making dozens of hours of archive-quality digital audio recordings.  The main work to be performed during the fellowship period is: (1) to transcribe and translate around 20 hours of the digital audio recordings; (2) to expand the lexical database with all of the new vocabulary found in the transcribed recordings; and (3) to expand the Ponosakan sketch grammar. (Edited by staff)

Associated Products

Ponosakan: A Dying Language of Northeastern Sulawesi (Article)
Title: Ponosakan: A Dying Language of Northeastern Sulawesi
Author: Jason Lobel
Abstract: Ponosakan, a Greater Central Philippine language of the Mongondow-Gorontalo branch, is spoken by only a few elderly residents of the town of Belang in Sulawesi Utara, Indonesia. Unlike its better-described and more widely spoken relatives Mongondow and Gorontalo, it has received virtually no dedicated attention in the literature, outside of being included in historical-comparative studies of the Mongondow-Gorontalo subgroup. This paper presents a sketch of the phonology and functors of Ponosakan, and provides historical and sociolinguistic information about the language and its century-long journey to extinction.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/602310
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Oceanic Linguistics 54(2): 396-435

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