Waima'a

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Documenting Waima'a, East Timor: Language endangerment and maintenance in a newly emerging nation

The team have adopted a community-based approach to the documentation. The basic documentation work (recording, first transcript, translation and annotation) is done by native speakers. The focus here is on providing for a wide variety of genres of speech and associated cultural activity. The researchers from Germany and Australia prepare the documents for archiving and add information on setting, culture and linguistic structures.

The multilingual nature of Timorese society and the demands of best international documentary practice mean that annotations for part of the corpus are provided in four languages: Portuguese and Tetum which are the two official languages of East Timor, as well as English and Malay, which are both recognised as (temporary) ‘working languages’ in the East Timorese constitution.

The project work also involves intensive interaction and cooperation with the East Timorese Instituto Nacional de Linguística (INL). Being the first major internationally funded research project of its kind, the project functions as a kind of guinea pig for both the establishment of a research policy in the new nation and for testing and developing policies for the minority languages such as Waima’a, which the constitution also recognizes as national languages.