The documentation of Ambel, an Austronesian language of Eastern Indonesia
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| Language | Ambel |
| Depositor | Laura Arnold |
| Affiliation | The University of Edinburgh |
| Location | Indonesia |
| Collection ID | 0377 |
| Grant ID | IGS0241 |
| Funding Body | ELDP |
| Collection Status | Collection online |
| Landing Page Handle | http://hdl.handle.net/2196/32310ee5-1136-4db3-a2fd-89ecf8dd7bf7 |
Blog post
Summary of the collection
This collection is an audio-visual documentation of Ambel. Ambel is an endangered language with around 1600 speakers. It is spoken in the Raja Ampat archipelago in West Papua province, Indonesia. Genetically it is an Austronesian language, of the South Halmahera-West New Guinea branch. However, like many of the Austronesian languages of Papua, it shows evidence of prolonged and intense contact with non-Austronesian languages, such as a complex prosodic system, clause-final negation, and many words with a non-Austronesian origin.
This project is supported financially by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the University of Edinburgh, and the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Documentation Programme.
This project is carried out in collaboration with the Center for Endangered Languages Documentation at Universitas Negeri Papua, Manokwari.
Group represented
Ambel
Collection contents
This collection comprises elicited and naturalistic speech. The naturalistic items cover spontaneous speech (e.g. conversations; personal reminiscences; expositional and procedural texts, such as information about local ethnobiology, local fishing techniques, and canoe-building), semi-spontaneous speech (e.g. narratives of traditional stories; oral histories), and planned speech (e.g. song; speeches). The remainder of the data in this collection comprises selected elicited material (morphological paradigms, syntactic structures, and lexical forms).
The corpus includes material from both male and female speakers, from a range of age groups.
Each bundle contains an audio recording of the session, which is accompanied by transcription, translation, and morphological glossing in an ELAN file. Some of the bundles also contain a video recording, and/or supplementary photographic data. In addition, included are a scan of the accompanying field notes, a metadata file, the consent form, and further information about the speaker’s language background.
An index to all the bundles is saved in the file ’00_AmbelIndex.pdf’. This file contains information on the content of each bundle, as well as basic metadata. The use of this index is highly encouraged, as it will facilitate navigation of this collection.
Acknowledgement and citation
When citing resources from this collection, please acknowledge Laura Arnold as the principle investigator. The following citation form is recommended:
Arnold, Laura. 2017. The documentation of Ambel, an Austronesian language of Eastern Indonesia. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-000C-E849-2. Accessed on [insert date here].
If audio or visual material is used from this collection (including photographs), the user is also required to acknowledge the individual speakers by name.
