Documentation of Walman
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| Language | Walman |
| Depositor | Matthew Dryer, Lea Brown |
| Affiliation | University at Buffalo |
| Location | Papua New Guinea |
| Collection ID | 0025 |
| Grant ID | MDP0038 |
| Funding Body | ELDP |
| Collection Status | Collection online |
| Landing Page Handle | http://hdl.handle.net/2196/d2435196-01a1-4f7a-afc6-4ac2078080ca |
Summary of the collection
This collection is the result of field research on languages in Sandaun Province in Papua New Guinea, that will result in a detailed grammatical description and dictionary of Walman. The data was collected by Matthew Dryer and Lea Brown between 2002 and 2017.
Group represented
Walman
Language information
Walman (Valman, ISO639-3:van)
Special characteristics
Walman is a Papuan language from the Torricelli family spoken on the north coast of Papua New Guinea, where there has been close contact with Austronesian languages. Austronesian influence on vocabulary is recognizable in some cases. Walman is like other Torricelli languages and unlike most other non-Austronesian Papuan languages in being SVO. An unusual phonetic feature is a prevalence of complex consonant clusters.
Collection contents
The collection comprises audio files and transcriptions and some video files with transcription of the audio component. Genres include narration, conversation, and elicitation from various speakers of phonetic features of importance in the language as well as words containing unusual phonetic features, and readings by one consultant of sentences he had written to illustrate words from the dictionary. Also included are PDF copies of 56 texts collected by an Austrian missionary Father August Becker and his local assistant in the early part of the twentieth century, with original German translations, and re-transcriptions into the modern Walman orthography with translations into English.
Collection history
Apart from PDFs of texts collected by Father August Becker between 1907 and 1934 (and published in Becker, August, S.V.D. 1971. Erzählungen der Valman von der Nordküste Neuguineas. Anthropos 66. 1-51, 397-443, 779-816), the data here was collected by Matthew Dryer and Lea Brown on various field trips between 2002 and 2017. Apart from the field trips funded by ELDP, other trips were funded by grants from the National Science Foundation in the U.S.
Other Information
The data was collected by Matthew Dryer and Lea Brown between 2002 and 2017.
Acknowledgement and citation
To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Dryer, Matthew & Lea Brown. 2015. Documentation of Walman. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-000F-AC57-7. Accessed on [insert date here].
