Discovering Mafea: texts, grammar, and lexicon

Valérie Guérin, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. (UHM)

Project Details:

Individual Graduate Studentship. Duration: 2005-2007. £12,292

Project Summary:

This project proposes to record and describe Mafea, an Austronesian language spoken by about 200 people on Mafea island, northern Vanuatu. To date, the only publication about the language is a 300-word list collected by Jacques Guy and published in Tryon 1976.

Two objectives guide this research: (i) to produce linguistic documentation for the Mafea language, in the form of a descriptive grammar, a lexicon, and a collection of digitized (and subsequently glossed) texts; and (ii) to convert digital documentation into literacy material (such as story books), in order to assist Mafea-speaking children and adults in developing L1 literacy skills.

Project archive deposit: