Through its Small Grants Program, the Pike Center sponsors research and publication that address issues faced by language communities on the margins of society. We are pleased to announce that two grants have been awarded in the latest cycle of this program.
$3,500 has been awarded to Ryn Gonzales for a project entitled “Vanaw Language Documentation and Description.” Vanaw is a speech variety within the continuum of Kalinga languages spoken in the northern Philippines. An MTB-MLE (Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education) program was initiated in the Vanaw community about a decade ago, and a written Bible translation project is now being planned for the near future. To date, linguistic study of Vanaw has been limited, focusing only on synchronic and historical phonology. This project seeks to address that gap by producing a grammatical description of the language, with particular attention to applications in education and Bible translation. Additionally, the project aims to develop a grammatical description template that can be used for documenting other Kalinga speech varieties. The project will collaborate closely with both local and national partners to ensure that the resulting description is practically useful. Ryn Gonzales is a Pike Scholar and serves as LEAD Co-Coordinator and Linguistics Consultant with SIL Philippines. She holds an MA in Missiology from the Alliance Graduate School and is nearing completion of a PhD in Linguistics at the University of the Philippines Diliman (UPD).
$1,600 has been awarded to Rahel Beyer for a project entitled “Chances and Challenges of Language Portraits as a Survey Tool in Cameroon.” As the metaphor of the “heart language” has not consistently connected with people in many multilingual target communities, there is an ongoing need to find more effective ways of understanding the emotive versus cognitive functions of language. This exploratory study will apply the Language Portrait (LP) methodology to address this challenge in several language communities in Cameroon. Although the LP method has been widely used in educational contexts, it remains largely unexplored as a tool within indigenous, multilingual communities. This project aims to assess the extent to which the method is effective in African contexts, particularly those with lower levels of formal education, and to evaluate its potential utility for language development programs. Dr. Rahel Beyer is a Pike Scholar and serves as a Language Assessment Specialist with SIL Cameroon. She holds a PhD in General Linguistics from the University of Münster, Germany.