Pike Center awards two small grants for language documentation

Through its Small Grants Program, the Pike Center sponsors research and publication that address issues faced by language communities on the margins of society. The program solicits grant applications three times per year, but has been victim to the pandemic with few applications in the last two years.  In this cycle, however, we are pleased to announce that two new grants have been awarded.

$3,000 has been awarded to Ryn Jean Fe Gonzales for the Itneg Ilaud Language Documentation Project. The Itneg Ilaud language is a threatened language of the Philippines that remains unstudied. The lack of knowledge about the language poses a problem for language development, in general, and the education program of the community, specifically. Ms. Gonzales will work with the community to develop and archive a corpus of fifteen hours of recorded speech, supplemented with some interlinearized texts and the beginning of a dictionary. The corpus will provide pedagogical content for the education curriculum, as well as data for language description and language development. Ms. Gonzales serves with SIL Philippines as a member of the Language Documentation Team. She is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of the Philippines.

$3,000 has been awarded to Benjamin Pehrson for a project entitled "Phonology of Onnele Goiniri: Sounds at the borders of the Torricelli family in Papua New Guinea." The Onnele Goiniri language has a unique sound system with certain features not previously known in the language families spoken in the region. This uniqueness poses a special challenge for writing the language with a number of sounds that are under-represented or not represented at all in the alphabet. The grant will allow Mr. Pehrson to bring Onnele speakers to a regional center where they can collaborate in analyzing the sound system of the language. Their research seeks to strengthen community ownership in such things as reading fluency and community engagement with locally published materials, as well as extend the boundaries of knowledge about a language with features yet to be attested in the languages of the region. Mr. Pehrson is a member of SIL PNG, where he serves as the Aitape West Team Leader. He is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Leiden University.