Sustainable Endangered Language Maintenance in the South Pacific
Start date
May 2023End date
March 2024Overview
It is predicted that more than half of the world’s 7000 languages will be extinct by the end of the century. UNESCO has declared 2022-2032 the decade of indigenous languages to ensure people’s rights to preserve, revitalise and promote their mother tongue.
Vanuatu is the most linguistically dense country in the world with over 130 languages and a population of around 300,000. Neighbouring New Caledonia, with a similar population, has 28 indigenous languages. Many of the languages in Vanuatu and New Caledonia are unwritten and endangered because of a lack of education, and intervention is needed to encourage communities to protect them for future generations.
This ESRC IAA-funded project aims to sustain language use within six local communities in the South Pacific, by identifying education needs in schools, training and upskilling teachers, creating literacy materials, and supporting local language consultants to create language documentation techniques.
The project will act as a catalyst for wider work in this area, leading to a significant societal impact on local people, supporting their wellbeing, as well as preserving cultural knowledge, traditions, and sustainable practices in communities.
Team
Principal Investigator
Dr Michael Franjieh
Research Fellow at the Surrey Morphology Group; Sustainability Fellow at the Institute for Sustainability
Biography
I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Surrey Morphology Group on the ESRC funded project Optimal Categorisation the origin and nature of gender from a psycholinguistic perspective. I am part of an inter-disciplinary team investigating the emergence of grammatical gender from classifiers in Oceanic languages from a pscyhologinguistic perspective.
Previously, I was an ELDP funded Post Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Newcastle, Australia where I worked on documenting and describing the endangered language Fanbak, spoken in Vanuatu. I have also lectured courses in linguistics at both the University of Surrey and at SOAS, Unviersity of London, and worked as a Post Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Cardiff.
Co-Investigator
Professor Greville Corbett
Distinguished Professor of Linguistics
See profile
Co-Investigator
Dr Alexandra Grandison
Associate Head of Education for the School of Psychology
See profilePartners
- Lomelfyarran Primary School, Vanuatu
- Senai Primary School, Vanuatu
- Nikaura Primary School, Vanuatu
- Agoru Village Community, Vanuatu
- Kanak Languages Academy
Children in Vanuatu
Children in New Caledonia
Planned Impact
The outputs of this project will help create a sustainable future for South Pacific people, and influence long term policy change around indigenous language loss, by strengthening links with educational stakeholders in the region. Impact will be measured through stakeholder interviews, teacher training workshops and follow-up surveys, and it is hoped this ESRC IAA-funded activity will leverage further grant funding to protect indigenous languages well into the future.
Funded IAA Projects
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