New methodologies for representing and accessing resources on endangered languages: a case study from South Efate (2004-2006)

Assoc. Professor Nick Thieberger
ARC Discovery Project DP0450342

Linguists produce material which has immense cultural significance as it is often the only record of endangered cultures. With new technologies come new ways of working with indigenous languages. This project developed an innovative methodology for documenting and archiving data from a language of the Pacific. It did this by linking a dictionary, texts, audio, video, images and a grammar in order to facilitate presentation of both the data and its analysis to speakers, fellow linguists, and the general public. The methodology developed during this project resulted in innovative linguistic data management techniques conformant to emerging international standards.