Tag Archives: research

What is Language Survey?

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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

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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).