Digital technology for language preservation:
Large-scale recording of languages and songs under the control of local communities in Papua New Guinea

Steven Bird

University of Melbourne

 New Guinea is home to over a thousand languages, or a sixth of the world’s total.  These languages are the primary manifestation of a cultural heritage, stretching back millenia.  Many small languages are falling out of use as their speakers switch to larger languages.  However, it is important to preserve the voices, stories, and songs of these languages while they are still spoken, for the benefit of future generations who would like to learn them, or learn about them.  Unfortunately there are not enough linguists, or sponsorship, to support the usual methods for language preservation.

 Instead, we would like to ask: can the speakers of small languages, which may be remote, unwritten, and endangered, be trained to create an archival record of their oral literature, with only limited external support?  This talk will describe a pilot study in Papua New Guinea, which may serve as a model for language preservation efforts in Papua and its 275 languages.

 Students at three universities in Papua New Guinea were trained in the methodology of “Basic Oral Language Documentation” as part of their university coursework.  This involved several steps: capturing narratives, dialogues, and songs on digital voice recorders; carefully respeaking and orally translating the source onto a second recorder; transcribing both the source and translation; and keeping careful records of the work in a logbook (Bird 2010).  The students used class sets of voice recorders which were donated to the project by Olympus.  An initial ten hour training session was run in each university in February 2010.

 At Divine Word University in Madang, final year students undertook a folklore course in the Department of Papua New Guinea Studies.  Of a class of 33 students, 32 languages were represented.  During the mid-semester break, half of the students travelled out to the speech community, while the rest worked with speakers available in the immediate vicinity of Madang.  At the University of Goroka, students undertook the Alekano Language course in the Department of Language and Literature.  Alekano is the language of Goroka, and students from other parts of New Guinea and the South Pacific are encouraged to enrol in this class.  Students were instructed in the use of the recorders, and made weekend visits to an Alekano-speaking community near Goroka.  At the University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby, students were enrolled in a final year field methods course in the Department of Linguistics.

 There are several benefits of using university students for language documentation work.  First, the students are already in a training environment, and it is easy to find a classroom where 35 students can be trained at once.  Second, the students do not need to be funded to do the documentation work, instead it can be incorporated into required coursework and assessed in the usual way.  Most students have sponsorship which permits them to travel home to their language communities during the long breaks.  Third, unlike expatriate linguists, the students can easily and inexpensively move about the country, stay in village locations, use an existing social network, and work monolingually.  Fourth, this approach to documentation does not take resources away from other documentation projects, but instead helps to identify the speech communities and individuals who are most highly motivated to do such work, which may serve as a useful starting point for a professional documentation project.

 A variety of challenges were encountered during the documentation activities.  For example, some students did not have sufficient command of their ancestral language in order to be able to transcribe and translate the oral literature they had recorded.  As another example, although the digital voice recorders are inexpensive and can be carried around inconspicuously, it is difficult to manage all the audio files created in this way.  The presentation will explore these issues and describe solutions that are being tested in our ongoing language documentation work.

 Bird, Steven (2010), A scalable method for preserving oral literature from small languages, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries, 5-14, Gold Coast, Australia. http://repository.unimelb.edu.au/10187/7141