Documenting Language, Ecology and the Aquatic Environment in Kala, an endangered Oceanic language

Bernice P Bishop Museum, Honolulu HI

Investigators

Abstract

Investigating the biological diversity of a specific region is essential to understand its species and ecosystems, and how species interact with each other and with their ecosystems. The traditional ecological knowledge of the people indigenous to that locale can enhance such investigations. Indigenous languages encode knowledge systems, so documentation of the language plays a key role in understanding of the region's plants, animals and other organisms. This project will simultaneously document both the language and the traditional ecological knowledge of an endangered language community. The community, which lives a near-subsistence lifestyle, is characterized by their adaptation to the coastal environment and their deep historical, economic and cultural attachment to rivers. Investigating the aquatic environment through language documentation will increase scientific knowledge in three areas: the language itself, the region's aquatic ecosystems, and the relationship of language to biological diversity. This project is urgent because endangered languages lose knowledge of domains like plant and animal classification much earlier than basic vocabulary and language structure. Broader impacts include an online encyclopedia, a museum exhibit and international research and training opportunities for a graduate student. The NSF Office of International Science and Engineering is providing support for international activities associated with this project. Kenneth Longenecker of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum leads an international collaboration with linguists and anthropologists at the University of Hawai'i and the University of British Columbia, teaming up to document the Kala language, a threatened language from the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family, spoken by about 2000 people living in six coastal villages in Papua New Guinea. A country roughly the size of California, Papua New Guinea is home to more than 850 languages, many of which are under-documented and spoken by small populations under intense development pressures. The exceptional biological diversity of Papua New Guinea is also under threat. By thematically documenting oral narratives conducted with Kala knowledge experts along river banks or near other aquatic habitats, the team will document accounts of historic relationships of specific clans to rivers, place name origins, species descriptions, descriptions of resource-use practices, and descriptions of beliefs associated with these environments. The project will result in expansions to an existing Kala-Tok Pisin-English dictionary, the development of an online environmental encyclopedia with entries in Kala and English, and a sketch grammar of the language. Digitized data will be archived by Kaipuleohone, the University of Hawai'i Digital Language Archive, and an interactive exhibit at Bishop Museum will share project results with the public. The project will generate data of scholarly interest to other disciplines that depend on language-related material (anthropology, biology, history, geography), while increasing our scientific knowledge of Kala.