We invite you to Pray (informed by posts below), Give, or Go. Thank you for bringing the people of Papua New Guinea before Jesus.
To be notified of new posts, subscribe at the top of the page. May the Lord bless your intercession.
Mala Survey – Madang Province – 2011
Airplane windows that open! Brilliant. I breathed in the increasingly humid air as we descended in the Cessna 206 down the steep northern slopes of the Finisterre Mountains toward the sea. Our first language survey, with all of the unknowns that any first brings, multiplied by being in the Land of the Unexpected – Papua New Guinea.
Language survey: research the sociolinguistic situation to identify needs and desires and suggest strategies for meeting them. Sociolinguistics: languages and how people use them. Simple, right? Not in a country with 840 languages. (See What Is Language Survey for a further intro.)
Starting in August 2010, half a year before this first survey, we’d been near Madang town. We were attending the orientation course all new staff go through, looking south towards the Finisterres. Now we were among those mountains. Soon, I was prone at their feet… laid out with a pounding headache, likely a combination of caffeine deprivation and elevation change from our main center and home town, a mile high in the PNG Highlands. Speaking of coffee: coffee grown IN THE VALLEY WHERE OUR CENTER IS was brewed every day at the office. Hard to resist (I later would).
After an inauspicious start, I was able to join my teammates in the land of the living, conducting research. Malalamai village was a great place to begin my research career: a village of 400 people near another village of 400 people called Bonga. These two villages were the only locations where the language was spoken. Dying? Not in the least! Their language, Mala, was spoken in all domains around the village, with other languages were reserved for outsiders. One of those other languages, Tok Pisin, is the language of wider communication we were using to converse with them.
One of my research tasks was to collect a wordlist, their equivalents for 170 words like stone, sky, come, she, father, etc. A funny one: horn! No animals native to Madang have horns. We later revised the wordlist to avoid trouble words like this. These words from the residents of Malalamai were compared to words from Bonga and other surrounding villages in a process called lexicostatistics to ascertain how similar the language varieties were lexically. Answer: Malalamai and Bonga were almost identical to each other, but were very different from other varieties in the area. Conclusion: the Mala people would benefit from literature in their own language. They, like most language group in PNG, had none.
In 2020 I was in a fiberglass dinghy off the Mala coast on the way to another language group. Since our visit in 2011, the Mala had been invited to a workshop run nearby – I believe it was an Alphabet Development Workshop – but they had not attended. This was at least in part because they were in disagreement about what their language should be called. The Mala people remain without literature in their language.
Want to read the full survey report? It’s at A Sociolinguistic Survey of the Malalamai [mmt] Language Area (name since shortened to ‘Mala’). Let us know what you think!
What is Language Survey?
We’d love to deep-dive into this topic over time, but let’s start simple: language survey = research into how people use languages.
If we were only studying languages, we’d be linguists. If we were only studying people, we’d be sociologists. Since it’s both, we’re sociolinguistic researchers.
There are 7000-ish languages around the world, 840-ish in Papua New Guinea (PNG). “-ish” indicates that there is much we don’t know about languages and the people that speak them globally!
We don’t research just to know more. We do applied research, desiring that those we study would benefit from language development. In PNG, many languages that people grow up speaking – “vernaculars” – are unwritten. Pause and think about that. Many times, an organization like ours is instrumental in developing literature and literacy.
Many PNGans who speak unwritten languages do have access to literature in other languages they speak. Most people in PNG are multilingual. Is this sounding complex yet? Determining what people do with languages, why they do it, and what kinds of development would actually help… our job as surveyors is somewhere in there.
100th Genesis
It’s time for the website adventure. We’ve done www.facebook.com/CartersPNG for many years (and will continue to), have www.wycliffe.org/partner/CartersPNG, did a blogspot back in the day… none capture the adventure like we can here. [Pardon any website-novice idealism.] So: ready, set, go!
Tell us what you want to see here! PNG is the Land of the Unexpected, and there are a million stories from past and present to tell. We’d love to hear your requests and suggestions. We also welcome questions.
As for our goals: As surveyors (sociolinguistic researchers), we write reports, but we aren’t fully satisfied when readers are just informed. Our research is intended to be applied, acted upon – in the survey context, this means language communities being served as a result of our research into their needs.
Likewise, we’d love for you to act on what you see here by praying, becoming part of our team, or getting involved in a more direct way yourself! Jesus’ call to “Go!” is for all believers.
There’s other space for about us on this page, but by way of a brief intro: we’ve been in Papua New Guinea since 2010, mostly working in language survey, but adding crisis management in 2015 and communications in 2020. We are just starting our third furlough, planning to return to PNG in January 2022.
“Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Mt 28:19-20).