AIFIS is pleased to announce a new collaboration with Peter Cole and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Delaware. The collaboration enlists students and universities from both the United States and Indonesia. Below are a few abstracts from their proposal, and the complete document can be downloaded here.

One of the major problems facing Indonesia, and much of the developing world, is the rapid loss of cultural and linguistic diversity. The problem is especially acute in East Indonesia, a region known for its diversity of languages, both Austronesian and Papuan, where the inroads of contemporary Indonesia on local cultures are well known.

The program involves training in language documentation in Kupang (one week), three weeks gathering stories, personal narratives, conversations, songs and other examples of the language spoken in a village in East Indonesia, and an additional week in Kupang preparing the data for archiving. The first year of the program is now complete, and the data from the first year have been submitted for archiving to Paradisec (http://www.paradisec.org.au/), an archive located in Australia that specializes in the languages and cultures of the Pacific. The American/Indonesian teams are now reviewing the results of the first year of the program and are preparing to recruit participants for the second year.

*Students working with local participants in Kupang*