Projekt

The project seeks to document the linguistic and cultural knowledge of the speakers of Savosavo, an East Papuan language spoken on Savo Island in the Solomon Islands. There are no closely related languages, and Savosavo is severely threatened by a number of socio-economic factors. Solomon Islands Pijin, the lingua franca of the region, is coming in to replace Savosavo in more and more contexts, reducing it to a home language. The fact that Savo Island, a small island with a diameter of about 6 km, is a dormant volcano and that there is an pending danger of an eruption also poses a threat to the language; the dispersal of the Savosavo speakers resulting from an evacuation to the surrounding islands, which are all inhabited by speakers of other languages, would almost certainly lead to the language falling out of use within one generation. The thematic focus of the project will be "local history, culture and environment". This topic will be approached by collecting narratives, conversations and procedural texts on four focal research areas: (1) all aspects pertaining to living on a volcano, (2) biographies and eye-witness accounts of recent historical events such as the Second World War and the national independence in 1978, (3) traditional knowledge and customs, (4) discussion on topics in the field of hortative discourse.

• Prof. Dr. Eva Friederike Schultze-Berndt

  University of Manchester
  Faculty of Humanities
  School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures
  Department of Linguistics and English Language
  Office NG12, Samuel Alexander Building
  Manchester
  Grossbritannien
  

• Claudia Wegener, M.A.

  Universität Graz
  Institut für Sprachwissenschaft
  Graz
  Österreich