Associated projects

The CELD acts as a local sponsor for a number of international research projects in the area. Among these projects are:

Documenting Mor, Harald Hammarström

Mor is a non-Austronesian language of the Bomberai peninsula, Fak-Fak district, Papua, Indonesia. Fieldwork in 2010 and 2012 has established that there are currently around 30 adults who are fully fluent speakers and about 70 children and adolescents who are semi-speakers, nearly all of whom live in the village of Mitimber about 5 hours from Fak-Fak. The Mor people are concerned with the loss of their language and would like to have a dictionary, text collection and, if possible, government support for the teaching of Mor in the local school. Documentation is on-going with trips in 2010, 2012, and 2013 with materials collected for a dictionary, text collection, and outline grammatical description.

Documenting Wandamen, Emily Gasser

Wandamen, also called Wamesa, is an Austronesian language with approximately 8,000 speakers on the southeastern Bird's Head of West Papua, from Bintuni in the west to Wasior in the south-east, and northwards along Wondama Bay. There are three main dialects: Windesi, Wandamen, and Bintuni. Wandamen is a member of the Yapen subgroup and is closely related to the languages Wooi and Ambai, and more distantly to Biak and Dusner. With support from the CELD, this project will produce a reference grammar of the Wandamen language with a theoretical focus on aspects of its morphophonology, as well as a small Wandamen/English/Indonesian dictionary and a corpus of annotated and translated texts for use by the community.

Documenting Ambel, Laura Arnold

Ambel is an Austronesian language of the South Halmahera-West New Guinea branch. It is spoken in several villages on the island of Waigeo, and in one village on the island of Batanta, in the Raja Ampat archipelago. There are around 300 speakers of Ambel. Like many Austronesian languages of Papua, it shows evidence of prolonged contact with non-Austronesian languages, such as a complex prosodic system, and many words with a non-Austronesian origin. Beginning in 2013, the aim of this project is to build an annotated audio-visual corpus of Ambel, representative of a wide variety of genres. This corpus will form the basis of a grammatical description of Ambel, as well as a trilingual lexicon (Ambel-Indonesian-English).

International researchers

Researchers planing to do fieldwork in Indonesian Papua are cordially invited to carry out their research in cooperation with the CELD. Among other things, the CELD can support their work with a letter of recommendation. For further information read the guidelines.