At a loss for words

 What does awot mean to you?

Around here, it probably doesn’t mean much, unless your name happens to be Lise Dobrin. And unless Dobrin and her colleagues do something about it, the word awot -- and the entire family of languages to which it belongs -- might not mean much to anyone in the future.

Dobrin, a lecturer in the anthropology department, conducted fieldwork for her dissertation in the northern coastal region of Papua New Guinea, where she documented a family of languages and dialects known as Arapesh. Arapesh, however, is quickly being replaced in the region by the English-based Creole language Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea.

Now Dobrin and several other University professors and staff members have received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to write a grammar for one particular Arapesh dialect and decipher the relationships between the connected languages. The grant comes as part of a joint initiative between NEH and the National Science Foundation called “Documenting Endangered Languages,” which encourages researchers to incorporate media and technology in efforts to save dying languages from extinction.

While in Papua New Guinea, Dobrin spent most of her time in the village of Wautogik, where she intensively studied a particular dialect called Cemaun, spoken there and in one adjacent village (in Cemaun, awot means “chicken”). Dobrin says she found the dialect difficult to learn because she heard it spoken so rarely -- while the older villagers could still speak Cemaun, the children were predominantly speaking Tok Pisin.

“They’re experiencing what linguists call ‘language shift,’” Dobrin says. “Cemaun is not being transmitted to the next generation. They associate it with backwardness, when what everyone’s aiming for is greater development.”

But there is more than just a historical motivation to preserve Cemaun and its related dialects. The Arapesh languages, Dobrin says, are unique in that nouns are predominantly classified not by meaning or gender, as in most European languages, but by their sounds. For example, both awot and urupat (“house”) belong to the same class because of the t sound at the end of the word.

“It’s very logical, very concrete,” Dobrin says.

The structure of the Arapesh languages, Dobrin says, also raises a lot of relevant questions about the larger study of linguistics.

“You can find evidence of this in a lot of places, even in Indo-European languages,” she says. Though this principle of phonetic organization is not taken to the same extreme in any other language, it bears directly on the central questions in the field of linguistics, such as how sound and sentence structure interact and how words are classified in the mind.

To gather the information she needed to study the dialect, Dobrin gathered hours of tape recordings of the language and transcribed them, with the help of native speakers, into written texts. She said a 30-minute conversation among a small group of people would take her about three weeks to transcribe. She also compiled lists of words and phrases from individuals there, which often blossomed into a trove of information.

“They have an encyclopedic knowledge of their environment,” she says.

Dobrin found her way to the village of Wautogik with the help of a missionary linguist who has spent decades in the region translating the New Testament into Arapesh languages. Although Dobrin said linguists and missionaries are often suspicious of each other, she considers the man to be a “warm colleague and friend.” He is now listed on the grant as an outside consultant.

The task now is to construct a grammar for Cemaun and document the variations within the Arapesh family. Dobrin, who directs the project, will work with two experts in digital media, David Golumbia, an assistant professor in Media Studies, English and Linguistics, and text-encoding specialist Daniel Pitti and the rest of the staff at the University's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH).

Dobrin says she hopes that documenting this language will give academics a better sense of the prehistory in this part of the world, before the languages themselves vanish.

“A lot more attention is being given to this problem in the field of linguistics now. Our research simply can’t go on if all our subject matter disappears.”