1/4 Goodenough Island Survey

Compilation post about this beautiful survey trip – helicopter, tropical island, wonderful people, win-win! – with daughter Anya, teammate Kristy, and translators Denis, Simon, and Christabel. From Sep 2022.

3/3 Muratayak Survey (Apr’22)

We enjoy telling stories on FB, but when one trip get spread across 33 posts – actually, 34 – the narrative gets a bit chopped up. We’ll combine original posts in three compilations here. Enjoy!

People and Opportunities

Language research is about people. It’s easy to talk about the adventure – the heat, the bugs, the mountains, the mud. Or about the work – facilitating group discussions on language vitality, collecting wordlists. But ultimately it’s about getting to know the people and discover opportunities to serve them.

A 2012 survey was particularly memorable, being more adventurous than most trips. Here are a few of the people we met along the way:

  • The people of the first village, so remote in their river valley that we reached them by helicopter. Only women, children, and a few old men present. Most of the working men were two days’ walk away at a mine. Those remaining in the village were timid, uncertain about how to handle their foreign visitors.
  • Children – We’re conscious of our ‘bling’ factor on survey. We have to carry papers and pens for research, water and food for sustenance, something to sleep in, medical supplies. Very quickly this begins to look like a great deal of wealth to rural PNGans, and, relatively speaking, it is. I pulled out the GPS to mark our location, the kids watched me curiously. In 2012, smartphones were very rare in the rural parts of PNG, and the GPS must have looked doubly strange.
  • Guide – Lazarus, the man who volunteered to guide us on a path so seldom used that – many times that day – I could be standing on the trail and not be sure where it went from there. We later learned that Lazarus didn’t know the path either, but his jungle literacy was far better than ours. As he scouted far ahead to discern the path’s direction, he would leave sticks pointing the way. In a jungle full of sticks, our ability to read the sign he’d left was at kindergarten reading level, at best. Lazarus had to come back to show us the way.
The famous “bai yu pundaun!” most visitors hear as a warning from locals. “You’ll fall!”
  • Armed local – Two of the surveyors were battered by falling throughout the day on the tricky trail, one a bit delirious. We descended a precipice after dark and were met be men with a rifle. They were afraid of retaliation from a nearby tribe with whom they were in conflict.
  • Dead daughter – An old man asked for conversation with a female surveyor. We were mystified, as this is culturally inappropriate. It turned out that he thought she resembled a dead daughter of his. He wondered whether our colleague was his daughter, returned from the grave with white skin.
  • Boatsman – We floated downstream in a forever-long dugout canoe, all four surveyors crowded together on a small bench in the middle. Bumping sideways over hidden logs, trying to remember if everything damageable had been sealed tight. The man with the pole at the far end of the canoe looked on with amusement.
  • Translation enthusiast – A man accompanied me around a village, assisting with information about the language use habits of residents. At one point he asked, “There were three ladies that came in 1990. We thought they were going to begin translation. Why has no work begun?”

These people remain without vernacular Scripture. They are family, or could be. Some need a clear invitation. Probably best to give that invitation in their language!

For groups like this one, our research’s conclusion is clear: they’d benefit enormously from the Bible in their language! Pray that people would answer God’s call to serve this group and many others like them.

72 days until our return to PNG!

Dream Pig

Fire-side story time! I wrote this story in 2015 imagining one PNGan’s life and his perspective on Bible translation. How different PNGans see and experience Bible translation varies widely across PNG.

Imagining life from another’s perspective can aid in relationship-building, especially across cultures. Of course, such imagining is inevitably imperfect; assumptions and conclusions should be checked and rechecked.

Dream Pig is also flawed, and there are things I’d change about it now, 6 years after I wrote it. If there weren’t things I’d change, I’d be concerned, as that would indicate I’ve stopped learning.

Dream Pig

Languages and Mountains – Chief Communications Officer

I have a half-time role as Chief Communications Officer (CCO). Communication is essential for Bible translation in a nation with 840 languages, especially when your staff come from 15+ countries!

The CCO and team produce our annual report, sent to government officials. We made this annual report poster-size, desiring that recipients hang them on their walls. Side 1 includes stories of perseverance, a letter to the government, stories of language vitality (recognize the lady?), and publications in PNG’s languages completed in 2020. [If you can’t read the images below, the file is available for download at the bottom of this post.]

2020 Annual Report – 1

Side 2 presents an abbreviated form of the EGIDS Mountain. Books have been written on this – if you’re interested, I’m happy to share more – but for our PNGan audience, our objective was to introduce this framework to encourage reflection about the vitality of their language. Many of PNG’s languages remain unwritten; an organization like ours can facilitate language development!

2020 Annual Report – 2

We’ve served in a variety of roles as we see needs we can meet. What skills could you contribute? In PNG, a wide range of professions are needed!

Rejoice that Bible translation continues through trials! Pray for the team; COVID continues to have an impact. “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me” (Ps 23:4).

When a Language Dies

A grandmother’s trembling voice told a story only two other people in the world could understand. A language which had been used to groan the pain of childbirth, remark joyfully at holding that baby, to say ‘mama’ and ‘papa’ for the first time, to teach the child right from wrong, by the child in delighted play in the jungle, for that child to know her own spouse and children, and on the cycle goes… that language was near it end.

Her voice accelerated with excitement, perhaps from happy memories, then became slow and thoughtful. The audio recorder captured her words. It, like we, heard only empty sounds. Recording and transcribing the story was inadequate, but it was something.

What does it mean to lose a language? A language is an artistic system to express all of the meanings deemed valuable enough to articulate verbally. A collaborative effort to explain the world. A tug of war between new words striving to find acceptance and old ones reluctant to be forgotten.

Let’s not forget, either, the knowledge contained within a language. These people are the leading experts in their particular environment. Over generations, they have captured with their labels and descriptions their best understanding of their place and how to succeed there. Rarely does such knowledge get translated to another language; it is lost.

We have many past and present examples of the horrendous uprooting that can occur when a language is lost through a people’s own choices – this is usually gentler – or because of an external force. Such uprooting can leave its people bewildered and disconnected for generations, identity-less and unable to describe and pursue value or purpose.

When grandmother’s story came to a quivering halt, there was only silence.

Steven from a neighboring group, Steve, local man in traditional attire, grandmother and 1 of 3 remaining speakers, Jed – surveyor, Jonathan – language documentation

Pray for those who’ve lost a language they loved, to find identity as God’s children. For those losing one to understand its value and to have wisdom to respond. Pray God’s message would be clear, regardless: “The heavens declare the glory of God… Day after day they pour forth speech… they have no words… Yet their voice goes out into all the earth” (excerpts from Ps 19:1-4).

Revel in the harmoniously discordant idiosyncrasies of your language, and celebrate others’!

Steven explaining an audio Scripture device in a nearby language with a translation

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.