River walks, reef dives, and Rapid Word Collection: Documenting linguistic and environmental knowledge with interdisciplinary and collaborative methods

Abstract

The lives of Kala people are deeply intertwined with marine and riparian environments on which their livelihoods depend. To document linguistic and environmental knowledge in these communities, as part of our communitybased, collaborative language documentation project, we utilized three main interdisciplinary documentation methods: (1) River walks, (2) Marine interviews, utilizing videos from SCUBA dives at local reefs, and (3) modified Rapid Word Collection workshops. About 2000 Kala-speakers live in six coastal villages in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. Our research took us to the three southern Kala-speaking villages in 2017 and the three northern Kala-speaking villages in 2019. Here, we discuss the importance of combining these three methods. As our project was highly interdisciplinary, including scholars of anthropology, biology, and linguistics, as well as Kala community researchers and knowledge experts, methods to capture multiple types of knowledge were essential to building the broadest data set possible. For instance, our inclusion of the river and marine environments provided us with interesting comparisons between the semantic categories of words in English versus Kala. Finally, we discuss how our revised versions of these methods, which we utilized in 2019, enabled us to improve overall workflow through audio-video syncing, transcription, and the reduction of electronic storage requirements.