A Documentation and Description of Yelmek and Maklew,
Two Endangered Languages of Papua, Indonesia
Tina Gregor
Thesis Proposal Review
Linguistically, the island of New Guinea is one of the most diverse regions in
the world, however only a very small percentage of its languages have been
described in detail, even though many are only spoken by very few people
and are highly endangered of disappearing. This research proposal is for a
PhD project concerned with two of these languages, namely Yelmek and
Maklew, two closely related non-Austronesian languages spoken in the
Papuan Province, Indonesia.
Yelmek (400 speakers) and Maklew (120 speakers) form an independent
family and are both highly endangered due to language shift to Indonesian.
The existing material on them is scarce and essentially all based on work from
the 1950s. My project aims at a documentation and description of either
Yelmek or Maklew with comparative remarks on the other, an annotated
digital corpus and a small dictionary.
In this TPR seminar, I am going to talk about what is know so far about these
languages and report on my exploratory field trip earlier this year. I will
present some of the data I collected and also give an outline of my thesis
plan.