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!
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1/3 Muratayak Survey (Apr’22)
We enjoy telling stories on FB, but when one trip get spread across 33 posts, the narrative gets a bit chopped up. We’ll combine original posts in three compilations here. Enjoy!
Between the Past and the Future
It was not yet dawn. The subtle sibilance of bare feet on trail was the only evidence of a man in front of me. His dark skin disappeared, but there was enough light to see irregularities underfoot – a dip, a stone, a root. But bare feet perceived more than eyes, this hour.
River crossings had a dim glow, trees unable to touch hands above the river’s expanse. The sound of water over rocks testified to shallow fords. Even in daylight, feet play a large role in negotiating underwater obstacles. Doubly so before sunrise!
The man ahead left a smell in the air – in no way unpleasant, but definitely human. I left the same smell; I’d eaten the same food and washed in the same rivers in the days preceding.
The trail followed the river’s calm but persistent journey to the sea. The team had a boat to catch to reach the airstrip to board the plane to fly home to family. Home: where security lights dim the stars – earthly concerns, however relevant, concealing heaven’s glory.
In that moment on the trail, my body desired nothing more than to walk the dim forest eternally, without fear, without thought, without knowing the passing of time. In the dark, I followed the man who knew the trail without seeing it. This was his ground. I was accorded the privilege of enjoying the profound present with him, in silence.
But time did not stop. Someone adjusted the light setting, ever so gently, revealing browns, greys, and the dark greens of the jungle. Eyes found more upon which to alight, more in which to delight. With my eyes’ awakening, the brain grew busier, and my body’s pleasure in the present faded.
The man I followed was now more than a shape. He became a young man who sometimes went barefoot and sometimes wore flip-flops; they were stored in his bilum as needed, along with very little else. His shorts made river crossings straightforward. His t-shirt prophesied the day’s coming heat. His hat and shaped beard showed attention to style.
Paradoxically, on this primordial ground at this hour of the day’s birth, the young man in an ancient world carried on his shoulder a Canon Pixma printer. It was being transported to our center for repair.
And thus the people of this land live between. Between the Past and the Future. Between depending on the generous earth and a fortnightly wage. Between wise, gnarled hands tending crops and savvy, city hands handling paperwork. They are masters of transition, of seeking to draw the good from each opportunity, leaving the bad. But evil is sticky.
Much of my life is in the Future; we move too fast to risk not focusing on what is coming at us. And so my feet remember that dark trail with longing. Perhaps I can find the grace to be Present, even here.
Mur Pano Survey – Madang Province – 2011
After completing research in Mala, we reboarded the dinghy and made our way up the coast to Mur village, where detective work was called for. Reports claimed that an undocumented language was spoken there. Could we ‘discover’ a language? Sounded exciting!
Communication infrastructure is such that contacting people in advance of our arrival in their village is usually impossible or impractical (though mobile phone service has significantly expanded since 2011). Mur was one such place. We sat in the shade cast by a house on stilts, awaiting the arrival of a leader who would know what to do with these strange visitors. It is not uncommon for us to be among the first foreigners to visit remote areas of PNG.
After a wait, we were accorded the hospitality typical of PNG villages: a house to stay in, food to eat, and all the conversation we could handle! It really is a fantastic environment for learning about each other. There was one weevil in the sago pudding: a young lady had recently died, and the community stopped everything to properly mourn. In villages like these, everyone is related.
community funeral 
Research under the moon
We participated respectfully and bided our time, but our detective work paid off after some days. The language situation was as follows:
- 1 language dead, no longer spoken, but remembered.
- 1 language named Dawang, reportedly related to Wab to the NW, spoken only by one old man in the village. His name was Moses, photo below. See When a Language Dies for more on dying languages.
- 1 language called Molet was related to another language, located inland, named Asaro’o.
- And finally, yes, an “undocumented” language. You can find it at Ethnologue. Notice the ISO code, [tkv]? Well, some people name stars or islands after their children. We got to link an ISO code to our first daughter’s name, Tikvah; she was born that same year.
Each of these groups has a rich history, but without writing, it can be hard to get at. They had an origin myth of three brothers who’d come down in canoes from the west, one stopping at Mur, one continuing down the coast, and one paddling across to Umboi Island. Lo and behold, Mur Pano is related to two other languages in the areas described: Pano (formerly Malasanga) down the coast and Karnai on Umboi. This supports their origin story.
Languages isolated by time and distance tend to diverge over time, so though the three brothers would have spoken the same variety, there are now three distinct languages. They have some shared words and similar grammar, but are indeed distinct languages, no longer mutually comprehensible, and requiring unique literature in each case.
This trip was before our development of participatory research processes. Because we used individual interviews and lengthy tools, research took more time than it does today, and we’d sometimes work late into the night.
Why so many languages in this one village, Mur? Because some decades ago authorities asked them to move to a single location for easier administration. Relocation from traditional lands and close contact with speakers of other languages often results in people shifting away from some languages towards others, as had occurred in Mur.
During our 2020 survey to the same coastline, which researched languages between Mur Pano and Mala, we stopped briefly at Mur because our dinghy was based there. I stepped out and wandered into the center of the village, remembering our first survey and old teammates. As at our first arrival, there weren’t many people there – they were likely out in their gardens. Though there is translation work going on nearby, Mur Pano people haven’t been able to partake in a significant way to date. If you were one of the 1,000 residents of the village, how would you think about the possibility of Scripture in your language? Would you judge it worth the effort? Will speakers of Mala and Mur Pano be among the “persons from every tribe and language” singing “You are worthy!” to God? (Rev 5:9).
Thus ended my first research trip, in 2011. In both the Mala and Mur Pano language areas we’d discovered a need for translation; in the later we’d ‘discovered’ an undocumented language. From 2010-present (Jun 2021), the survey team has conducted research among 70 language groups in PNG, some large, some small, most of which would benefit from Scriptures in their language.
Pray for the Mala and Mur Pano, and the 70 language groups we’ve researched in the past decade! Consider playing a part in researching and advocating for other speakers of minority languages by partnering with us!
Want to read the full survey report? Here it is: A Sociolinguistic Survey of the Mur Village Vernaculars. Tell us what you think!
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!
