Preserving the unheard, promoting the unspoken: The challenges of documenting, preserving, and promoting Kibiri, a critically endangered isolate.
Résumé
Kibiri [prm] is an underresearched isolate language known by 32 people living at Kikori and other villages around the Kikori river, at Kikori district in the Gulf province of Papua New Guinea. The actual number of tribal members is probably 300. The tribal members as well as L1 speakers live scattered throughout Kikori and the surrounding villages and with members of non-Kibiri tribes: Kerewo, Porome, Kope, etc. The only remaining speakers are people above 40 years old and they mostly communicate in Hiri Motu (henceforth HM) among them and with family members. Others fully master Kerewo [kxz]. This paper presents ungoing research and is the very first introduction to Kibiri’s sociolinguistic situation with an accent on how lack of language use and linguistic ideologies affect language documentation and description and the researcher’s work. A brief description of verbal number in Kibiri is also outlined to exemplify how complexity can be found in moribund languages in the world.
The data and information presented in this paper were obtained through direct participant observation, interviews, and fieldwork methods during my field trip in the area from January 2022 to late November 2022. I have obtained about 70 hours of first-hand recordings on Kibiri which are currently being processed. The results presented in this paper are therefore preliminary and might change as my research and analysis on Kibiri continues.
This paper is part of the proceedings of the LSPNG 2022 Annual conference, held at the National Research Institute in Port Moresby, on September 21st and 22nd, 2022.
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LSPNG 2022 Conference Paper Proceedings PDF.pdf (542.66 Ko)
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LSPNG 2022 Presentation version HAL PDF.pdf (4.05 Mo)
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