Lise Dobrin
Research Assistant Professor
UVa Anthropology

Thanks to a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, IATH resources will now be applied to a new area of humanistic concern: documenting and preserving the world’s endangered languages. IATH technical staff will support the Arapesh Grammar and Digital Language Archive project directed by Lise Dobrin of UVA’s Department of Anthropology, along with UVA digital media expert English Professor David Golumbia and IATH text encoding specialist Daniel Pitti.

The Arapesh Grammar and Digital Language Archive project will create a rich digital repository of sound recordings, text, and grammatical information about the endangered Arapesh family of languages, which are known to linguistic science for their unusual sound-based noun classification and agreement systems. Traditionally spoken by people living along the New Guinea north coast, in many villages Arapesh is no longer being learned by children, who grow up speaking the local lingua franca Tok Pisin instead. In addition to ensuring that Arapesh is preserved in a robust form for future generations, the Digital Language Archive will serve as a research tool for the other part of Dobrin’s project, producing a written grammar of Arapesh focusing on the Cemaun dialect. A multilingual, multimedia web site will also be developed to provide the public with an accessible resource on this remarkable group of languages.

Click to play a sample of the Arapesh language:

[Clemen Hayin narrates the history of his village; Arnold Watiem and others listen and “help” with the telling. (Duration: 1:23)