This grant supports the fieldwork and research for a project to document Nama, an endangered language spoken in Western Province, Papua New Guinea, one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world where language documentation is critically needed. Spoken by around 1,200 people, Nama belongs to the Morehead-Upper Maro family, which is a poorly understood and undocumented minority Papuan language group.
Nama is interesting because it exhibits a set of morphosyntactic properties which are unattested in the Trans-New Guinea (TNG) family, the largest and heretofore most extensively documented Papuan family. Furthermore, Nama uses an extremely rare senary numeral system with the base 6, which is assumed to have cultural underpinnings. The documentation of Nama will be an important step toward providing a more fine-grained characterization of Papuan languages and developing a more comprehensive account of linguistic variation in the New Guinea region. It will also establish significant ties between outside researchers and the Nama community and will validate the importance of Nama among the local population.
This project will produce an extensive and multifaceted description of Nama: a comprehensive reference grammar detailing syntactic, morphological, and phonological properties of Nama; a Nama-English lexical database which will lay the foundation for the future compilation of a bilingual dictionary; a publicly accessible online corpus of annotated audio recordings of native speakers (containing, for example, short stories, conversations, narratives, elicited utterances); an archive of textual and paradigmatic materials; and, research papers analyzing morphosyntactic properties of theoretical significance. This project will also contribute to the scientific training of a promising scholar.
This project provides the first scientific investigation of Ranmo (also identified as Blafe by Ethnologue), a Papuan language belonging to the Morehead-Upper Maro family (on the South-Central Papuan branch), spoken by around 300 people in Yenthoroto village, Western Province, Papua New Guinea. Between 2013 and 2014, extensive linguistic data collection and analysis was carried out in close collaboration with speakers of Ranmo toward the goal of producing a grammatical sketch of the language, a Ranmo-English lexical database, and an online corpus of recorded and transcribed narratives. Some of the most notable characteristics of this language uncovered and described include "split" patterns of personal/number marking related to valency alternation; a two-root system reflecting the notion of inherently plural verbs; the independence of verbal agreement and nominal case marking; and disparate instances of morphological syncretism in the verbal domain which can be united by the common structural factor of object demotion or absence. Since Ranmo belongs to a minority non-Austronesian family that is currently virtually unknown, the contribution of this project is significant, not only in enriching the empirical content of the Papuan literature but also in the important task of identifying language universals and giving a more fine-grained and comprehensive account of linguistic variation. The project also crucially serves to raise awareness among community members about the value of their local language and has laid the foundation for vernacular literature development for Ranmo.
