Documentation of the Neverver language, Malakula, Vanuatu

Julie Barbour, University of Waikato

Project Details:

Individual Graduate Studentship. Duration: 2004-2007. £16,978

Project Summary:

This project will focus on the documentation of the Neverver language of Malakula, spoken by fewer than 1000 people in two inland villages. The intention of this project is to provide a detailed grammatical description of this unknown language, including an analysis of its phonology, morphology and syntactic structure as well as presenting a selection of discourse features of oral texts.

Ongoing project description:

Community-based research outputs will include a trilingual dictionary (Neverver-English-Bislama), a school word-list, text collections for children and adults and assistance with the publication of a hymn book written by a local chief and community elder. Beginner literacy materials for children will also be developed for use in kindergarten.