The main focus of my research is language documentation through community-based language documentation.
Below are details of some of the research projects I have done or been part of:
Language Documentation and Revitalization of the Woleaian language (Micronesian)
Since 2021, I have been working with the Woleaian-speaking community, both in Hawaiʻi and in Yap State on documenting their language and culture. Woleaian is a Micronesian language spoken on 7 small coral atolls in the Outer Islands of Yap State, Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), as well as in the diaspora in Guam, Hawaiʻi and the continental United States. Speaker estimates vary, but the community estimates around 2,000 Woleaian-speakers globally. The main community I have been working with is that of Eauripik atoll, the smallest of the seven, with about 70-90 inhabitants, but larger populations on Yap Main Island. A village, Gargey, on Yap Main Island was my main field site for two fieldwork trips in early 2023, and serves as a continued touchstone whenever I visit Yap for fieldwork. The Woleaian-speaking community has noticed a decline in the continued use and remembrance of traditional Woleaian oral and physical culture.
Salvage Linguistics Project on Eastern Sentani (Sentanic)
For my Master’s Thesis at Leiden University, I wrote a sketch grammar of the Eastern dialect of Sentani. Sentani belongs to the small Sentanic language family spoken in North-Central New Guinea, on and around Lake Sentani, Papua, Indonesia. The Eastern dialect is highly endangered, with possibly only a single native speaker, Gershon Kaigere, left. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic fieldwork was not possible, but I was able to work Gershon in person since he has been living in The Netherlands since 1963. Because he has been away for so long, and the Eastern Sentani community was already switching to Papuan Malay by the time he left, he had not had the chance to speak his language for almost sixty years. Because of this, Gershon had undergone major language attrition when we started working together, having difficulty recalling basic words beyond a handful of culturally-informed words. However, through the course the year in which we worked together weekly, he was able to recall more and more of his ancestral language. By the end, we were able to record two stories in his language based on earlier written records on the language from a different dialect. This was my first encounter with what some call “salvage linguistics”, where a language has moved towards dormancy to such a degree that there are only a few heritage speakers, rememberers and/or attrited speakers left. However, it does show that a language acquired as a native language will not necessarily remain attrited when re-exposed to it both or either internally and externally.