Strategies to establish sustainable structures

for endangered languages documentation in Papua

Yusuf Sawaki

Center for Endangered Languages Documentation, UNIPA, Manokwari

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Center for Endangered Languages Documentation (CELD) Papua, together with speech communities and university personals (lecturers and students), frame what is so-called ‘triangular-participatory approach’ in the language documentation. The vision is to establish a center for excellence for language documentation and conservation in Papua. The missions are to establish sustainable local structures for endangered languages documentation, to develop an ethno-linguistic center for excellence in UNIPA, and to build multi-level capacities. The “current” approach we use to fulfil our missions is that CELD builds a ‘triangular-participatory workflow’ in which CELD members, students/lecturers, and language community members work together to share their ‘knowledges’ as the main stream of the workflow.

To establish a center for excellence, capacity building is crucial. Internal and external capacity buildings are two major issues dealing with establishing sustainable structures. The internal capacity building deals with how to establish sustainable infrastructures in broader sense in which states of arts technology, human resources and management are developed in more systematic and structural ways.  The external capacity building relates to building up networking, of which CELD sets up any links to local, national, regional and international related-institutions, local language speaking communities and establishes policies that will run the network system. This is what we call as building multi-level capacities.

CELD believes that by establishing well-structured, well-managed and sustainable infrastructures of endangered languages documentation in Papua, we become agents of changes in preserving and documenting our cultures and languages in Papua.