A fascinating new language documentation project gets under way next week. The BOLD:PNG project (Basic Oral Language Documentation :  Papua New Guinea) involves training university students and literacy teachers to collect and curate oral texts from native speakers of the 830 indigenous languages of  Papua New Guinea, many of which are at risk of disappearing.

As the overview page for the site points out, this type of work has been done by linguists for years, however, this painstaking individual work can’t keep pace with the rate of language loss. The BOLD-PNG project addresses the problem of scale by training university students and literacy teachers to collect language data from native speakers over the course of the one-year project using voice recorders donated by Olympus.

For more on languages of New Guinea, check out the entries on New Guinea Languages, Papuan Tip Languages and North New Guinea Languages in the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, available online to UBC folks. The language lists in the entries on Papuan Tip Languages and North New Guinea Languages also  include location and approximate number of remaining speakers.

We have a number of books on Papuan languages in Koerner, including a key text called  Papuan languages of New Guinea by William Foley (part of the Cambridge language surveys).

Good luck to all involved in the project!