publications about Nalik culture

publications about Nalik education

Volker, Craig Alan. “Vernacular education in Papua New Guinea: Reform or deform?” Education in Languages of Lesser Power: Asia-Pacific Perspectives, edited by Craig Alan Volker & Fred Anderson, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. IMPACT: Studies in Language and Society Book 35. 2015. pp 205-211

DOI 10.1075/impact.35.12vol

This chapter looks at the example of the challenge of establishing a school in the Nalik language of New Ireland Province. While the change to vernacular education has meant more children have at least a passive understanding of Nalik, the change from an English-only educational system is blamed by many parents for declining educational standards.

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da Silva, Cláudio.  “Tell us your story: documenting the Nalik culture through an educational project in Papua New Guinea.” Asian Conference on Education & International Development 2018, Conference Proceedings, 2018. pp. 311-327.

Papua New Guinea has a great biocultural diversity, and a subsequent wealth of traditional knowledge of numerous ethnic groups. Much of this is related to plants and animals and is knowledge that has evolved over generations in a long process of human interaction and relationship with nature (Maffi, 2007). This work aimed to record and document the lifestyle, stories and folk tales about birds present in the cultural imagination of the Nalik people. This research was conducted at Madina and Luaupul villages in New Ireland Province during the months between September to November 2016. Among the intended objectives were enhancing an awareness of cultural biodiversity and contributing to the empowerment of the community through renewed interest in its cultural heritage. The participants were six and seventh grade students and members of the local community. Research was conducted through three steps: (1). Recordings of oral narratives in the community, and subsequent interpretation of their symbols in the local context; (2). Exploration of these recordings through interdisciplinary activities with the students and developing the transposition of oral narratives into drawings and written forms; (3). Validation and correction of the students’ text by the community. The material resulting from this process was subsequently edited and the final output was the short jointly authored book “A Maani: Birds and Nalik Culture” created through the eyes and experiences of the participants of the project.

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da Silva, Cláudio. “Documenting local traditional culture through an interdisciplinary educational project in Papua New Guinea.” Rehearsing Science and Art to re-connect culture and nature. edited by Alison Neilson & José Eduardo Silva, Porto: Teatro do Frio, 2019. pp 93-102.This work describes the recording and documentation of some aspects of the oral history of the indigenous Nalik people of PNG. During the research, much information and many narratives were collected. These were used in the production of a collective book A Maani: Birds and Nalik Culture2 (da Silva & Volker, 2018), written together with students at Madina Primary School. This was the result of artistic activities and the production of collective and individual texts, all related to ethno-zoological themes present in the local culture.

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Mazzitelli, Lidia Federica. Documentation of Lakurumau: Making the case for one more language in Papua New Guinea. Language Documentation & Conser-vation 14, pp. 215-237, 2020.

This paper provides an introduction to Lakurumau, a previously undescribed and undocumented Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. The first part of the paper is a guide to the Lakurumau documentation corpus, deposited in the ELARarchive. The participants and the content of the deposit, the technology used for recording, and the ethical protocols followed in the con-struction of the corpus are discussed. In the second part, a brief grammatical descrip-tion of Lakurumau is presented, providing morpho-syntactic and sociolinguistic evi-dence in support of the classification of Lakurumau as an independent language, and some directions for future work are outlined.

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da Silva, Cláudio & Craig Alan Volker (eds). A Maani: Birds and Nalik Culture. Sheridan, Wyoming: Education Projects International, 2018.
ISBN: 978-1-5136-1827-2

This is the  first children's book about a New Ireland culture. It is based on texts written by students at Madina Primary School and describes aspects of Nalik culture that they feel are most important for people to know. Birds play a central role in Nalik culture as the symbols of the clans that are the basis of Nalik society and law.

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Volker, Craig. “Variation in Nalik grammar.” Oceanic studies: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Oceanic Linguistics, edited by John Lynch and Fa‘afo Pat, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics C-133, 1996, pp 451-462.
DOI:10.15144/PL-C133.451

This paper discusses nine types of variation among speakers of Nalik, an Austronesian language of northern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea: the disappearance of the passive construction, a move away from verbal comparative constructions, the shift in the future marker becoming an irrealis marker, the loss of a distinction between transitive and intransitive durative marking, changes in the use of irregular plural markers, the use of a numeral instead of a dual marker article, the blurring of the distinction between alienable and inalienable possession, and the move of the preposition meaning ‘with’ to a verbal construction.These innovative constructions tend to affect marked features in Nalik that are being levelled by contact with Tok Pisin and English in the speech of bilingual and trilingual Nalik speakers.. The innovative forms are spreading through the population at an uneven rate and unevenly through the lexicon of individual speakers, causing variation between individuals and even in the speech of individual speakers.

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Anderson, Gregory D.S., Christie Paskalis and K. David Harrison. Nalik Talking Dictionary. Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, 2015

Listen to spoken Nalik.

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Volker, Craig [クレイグ ・フォルカー]. “ナリク語の辞書作成の経過報告 NO.1 : ナリク語の数学 / A Lingmaam 1: A Ikakating wan a ling a Nalik / Nalik Dictionary Project 1: Nalik Mathematics”. Annals of the Gifu University for Education and Languages, No. 32, 1996, pp. 1-33.

As the first dictionary of the Nalik language of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea is being prepared, this first report of work in progress discusses Nalik mathematics terminology. Today most Naliks use English / Tok Pisin numbers, but there is also an indigenous counting system that uses a mixed base five and base ten system. In the past there was also a sacred counting system used for ceremonial purposes. With the introduction of vernacular education in Nalik, terms have been coined to express modern mathematical concepts.

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Volker, Craig. The Nalik Language of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. Berkeley Models of Grammars Series 4. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1998.
ISBN 0-8204-3673-9

This grammar of Nalik provides one of the most accessible and detailed descriptions of a New Ireland language, even while English and Tok Pisin are becoming increasingly dominant among the four thousand Nalik speakers. Rejecting the idea of an artificial «standard» form of the language, this volume is unusual in its description of the grammatical variation caused by such a fluid linguistic ecology.

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Volker, Craig Alan. "Nalik Grammar (New Ireland, Papua New Guinea)." PhD dissertation, University of Hawai'i. 1994

This PhD dissertation is the  first description of Nalik grammar and includes an explanation of the Nalik orthography.

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