| FN-230212-15 | Research Programs: Dynamic Language Infrastructure-Documenting Endangered Languages - Fellowships | Brenda H. Boerger | Natügu Dictionary and Legacy Texts | 6/1/2015 - 7/31/2016 | $50,400.00 | Brenda | H. | Boerger | | | | SIL International | Dallas | TX | 75236-5629 | USA | 2015 | Linguistics | Dynamic Language Infrastructure-Documenting Endangered Languages - Fellowships | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 |
Natugu is an endangered Oceanic language spoken by Melanesians on Santa Cruz Island in Temotu Province of the Solomon Islands, South Pacific. Both the language community and the Solomon Island government support language development work, with an eye to future vernacular education. Such documentation and description needs to be undertaken soon in light of language displacement stemming from increased use of Solomon Island Pijin. The purpose of the research is (1) to produce a Natugu dictionary with an English finder list, for two audiences using two orthographies and different media: books and digital versions for the language community and a digital version for linguists; (2) to annotate legacy texts: an 80-page handwritten autobiography with an oral reading on video, plus 15 hours of digitized legacy cassette recordings. The applicant’s home archive, the Summer Insitute of Linguistics (SIL) language and culture archives, will host the corpus. The work has three phases (1) a two-month pre-field phase to prepare the lexical database in FLEx and to interlinearize the autobiography; (2) a four-month fieldwork phase for semantic domain elicitations, AV recording of the autobiography, and oral processing of the texts; and (3) a six-month post-field phase to refine dictionary entries, generate dictionaries, format books, and archive the full corpus. (Edited by staff)
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