Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language Documentation of Wamesa

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

Of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, it is estimated that at least half will cease to be spoken within the next 100 years. Many of these languages are so far entirely undocumented, meaning that when they fall out of use no record of them will remain, and the knowledge they encode will be irrevocably lost. One such language is Wamesa, currently spoken by approximately 8,000 people in the province of West Papua, Indonesia. The goal of this project is to document Wamesa, creating a lasting record of the language. Ms. Gasser will spend seven months in Indonesia working with native speakers of the language and recording stories, conversations, and elicited texts. The result will be a reference grammar of the language, a transcribed corpus of recorded texts, and a small Wamesa/English/Indonesian dictionary. The reference grammar will also be submitted as the doctoral dissertation. This work will be of value to linguistics and to the Wamesa people. Though Wamesa has more speakers than many neighboring languages, very little research has been done on it. This means that Wamesa is not informing linguistic theories; any insights it might provide are currently unavailable to science. Wamesa children growing up in cities communicate primarily in Indonesian, putting the future of Wamesa in jeopardy. It is important to begin work now while the speech community is still vital enough to provide a thorough account of the language and its structures. The dictionary and collection of recordings produced by this project will be valuable to the Wamesa community as they work to preserve their traditional language and culture. Finally, this project will provide linguistic training to local college students so that they may undertake the documentation, analysis, and preservation of the many other endangered languages of Papua.