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.
Tag Archives: research
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!
2/3 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!
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!
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.
- 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!
Multi-part Harmony
The nose of our fiberglass dinghy dove sickeningly towards the face of the next wave. I was sure it would spear into the wave and we’d be submerged. I’d heard of boats doing this. On another trip, our boat pilot had once been late to meet us because he’d rescued people lost at sea in this manner.
Somehow the bow rose up the wave, pointing skyward. Then again we plunged down, and I was sure we’d spear into the wave and be submerged. Did someone leave this song of doom on repeat?
Our posts, newsletters, and presentations often speak of unmet need for two reasons: 1) we desire your partnership in meeting the need, and 2) we’ve met those in need, and unmet need rankles. But it’s important to celebrate too, to recognize God’s activity. So here’s a positive tale.
In 2015 we had an intern join the survey team for a few months. He and I went to Milne Bay Province where a translation team had asked for research into the dialect situation in the language group they worked with. This project had significant local support:
- the community had started translation work on their own initiative
- they had invited our organization to provide guidance and expertise
- locals were assigned to literacy training, distribution, and translation activities
The question the survey team was asked to answer: “Will this translated material serve the dialect to the west?” The survey team decided that, rather than just doing the research and giving the new translation team an answer, we would train them to answer such questions on their own.
Hence the dinghy ride of doom. As such experiences often do, it felt like an eternity of plunging to the ocean’s depths – particularly when someone’s seat broke from the repeated pounding – but we rounded the point and the rest of the scene reasserted itself: the tropical sun, ocean breeze, and white-sand beaches. Even the water suddenly looked warmer as the waves relaxed.
In the following days we used our Wheel of Vitality and Dialect Mapping tools repeatedly. At first we facilitated them with the translation team observing, then gradually they took over. By the end of the trip, we were confident they could continue to investigate these questions on their own.
Before departing overland – an even bumpier experience than the dinghy ride, though sweeter by virtue of the watermelons being transported – our intern had his highlight experience: sharing a message at a local church. He subsequently became a youth pastor far from the ocean. Ha!
A bit more about the Wheel of Vitality, which we’ve alluded to in Survey Trail and Languages and Mountains (or see the technical write-up from soon after we invented the tool):
It’s primary purpose is to assess intergenerational language transmission in multilingual communities. By learning about how the languages available to the community are currently used and what factors are influencing language choice, we can identity the EGIDS level of the language and make estimations about its future. Since Bible translation is often a multi-decade endeavor, it makes sense to have some confidence that the language will be spoken when the translation is completed!
What factors do you think influence language vitality in this community? Write and let us know!
While we were there, it felt like we, the translation team, and the local folks were singing a multipart harmony joyfully and beautifully. “How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!” (Ps 133:1) But our tale in Milne Bay has a twist ending: the translation team moved to a different role a few years after this trip, so translation has slowed since. Pray that all the “singers” needed for effective harmony can be recruited, and that “the Lord bestows his blessing, even life forevermore” (Ps 133:3).
Anyone bothered by the redundancy of ‘multi-part harmony?’ To have harmony, more than one singer is needed. The temptation can be to try to go it alone, but God made us for teamwork!
Is It Dangerous?
“Is it dangerous?” We get this question sometimes when we share about conducting language research in remote villages in PNG. Yes, there is some danger and a high degree of uncertainty.
Why do we do it? Here’s one way to look at it:
- Problem: people without any Scripture in the languages that communicate best
- Solution: experts translate the Bible, guided by research (that’s our job)
- Outcome: people engage with Scripture in their languages, better able to know and follow God
Would you go to an event if your invitation was written in a language you don’t know well? “If this is really for me, why isn’t it in my language? I’m not entirely sure what this is about.” God invites people from every nation and tongue to his table. Translating the invitation – the Bible – makes it clear and cogent.
God created humankind and seeks to live in everlasting fellowship with it. Sin – rebellion against God and his design for us – separates us from God. Some facts enable us to understand God’s invitation: that we are sinners and condemned, that Jesus as the sacrificial lamb opened a Way to God, that we have but to believe in the Savior and follow our Lord. Those facts must be communicated; complex communication happens best with words. Hence the Scriptures.
Let’s examine that problem further: “people without any Scripture in the languages that communicate best.”
- We’re about people, possessed of eternal souls, just as God is. Sometimes we get to talking a lot about languages and translations, but it’s about people like you and me.
- Once you’ve learned to read, it’s pretty difficult to know what it’s like to be illiterate. Similarly, for those with Scriptures in their language, it’s hard to imagine themselves without Scriptures. Try for a second. The Word is a treasure.
- There is no substitute for Scripture, no alternative. God purposed it and imbued it with great power.
- Languages are the primary way people connect with other beings, including spiritual beings. Multilingual people have several languages to choose from, but usually a particular language is used for their most significant interactions. They will benefit greatly if they are able to connect to God in that language.
Today, “Bibleless peoples” are on a continuum, which includes:
- those with no Scripture in their language
- those with Scriptures in one of the languages they regularly use, but not in the language that would ‘communicate best.’
For those with zero access to Scripture (1), the need for translation is clear. For those with some access (2), what is needed or desired can be less clear, but translation can often be beneficial.
Here’s a curveball for you: in Oceania, Asia, and Africa, there are hundreds of people groups whose level of Scripture access is insufficiently understood. In PNG, our team’s research in 70 language groups since 2010 has:
- described previously undocumented languages
- found multiple dying languages not in need of Scripture (these people now speak other languages), and
- has confirmed that the speakers of a significant portion of these 70 languages would benefit from Scripture.
By last count, there were close to 2000 language groups in Oceania, Asia, and Africa about which not enough is known to categorize translation need with confidence.
Solution: RESEARCH! Understanding what type of translation is beneficial and where is the first step towards meeting the needs of these people who are, in some ways, “the least of these” (Mt 25:40, 45).
Research guides translation experts to where they are needed, and often provides strategic information about how to work with a particular people group. Those translation experts do the heavy lifting, often investing 10-30 years working alongside local people to complete a New Testament.
The outcome is wonderful: another people group with God’s Word clear and attractive; “God speaks my language.”
It would be nice to end this post there. The reality, as shown by our Scripture Use Research and Ministry project (2014-17), is that many communities who have Scripture in their language do not use it as much as we hope. Why? Well… that’s another post. What it means: that communities benefit when someone – whether people from our organization or someone else – comes alongside them beyond the completion of vernacular Scriptures. If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a strong proponent of long-term relational engagement across cultures, walking with God and pursuing him together, using all the languages we speak.
Your part in this is pretty special, and critical. Without you, most cross-cultural Bible translation work – and the research that guides translation – just doesn’t happen. With such an involved task, a tent-making approach generally isn’t viable. You provide the financial, prayer, and relational support needed for translation and research experts to do their jobs in those thousands of languages which remain Scripture-less.
Well, that’s one way to look at the ‘why.’ Additional pieces would include personal indebtedness to God’s redemptive work and the power of his Word in our lives. It’s a big endeavor, complex in its motivations. It’s part of God’s Kingdom work.
“Is it dangerous?” A counterquestion: “What’s worth risking in service to our Lord?” And a testimony: our experiences in remote PNG villages has generally been very positive. Hospitality is widely practiced.
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!
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.
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’!
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!
