Matukar Panau corpus building for the study of language use in context

Abstract

Matukar Panau is a highly endangered Oceanic language spoken near Madang, Papua New Guinea. Although most children are no longer learning Matukar Panau, current speakers (apx. 300) form a vibrant community of multilinguals in dense social networks. As an Oceanic language on the PNG coast, Matukar Panau has many interesting Papuan features. No other language of this area has a large corpus available. This project produce 47+ hours of audio-visual recordings and a 200,000+ word corpus. Recordings focused on conversations where participants are varied by age, gender, clan, social connections and differing language portfolios to document speaker interaction. Pairs of speakers discussed life, customs, and family and responded to stimuli-based activities. Transcription and translation of data into the PNG lingua franca, Tok Pisin, was done with an existing trained local team.