Locals learn own dialect

 MOTHER tongue speakers of a language may converse, joke or compose poetry with ease, but few actually analyse the structures uses. 

For language development practitioners, the opportunity to study the grammatical structures of their own language can provide insights into the quality of the work they produce – whether that work is a reading primer for literacy students or a translation of health materials or Scripture.

SIL PNG recently hosted a Discover Your Language course at the Ukarumpa Training Centre in the Eastern Highlands. 

Eighteen participants from 12 language communities came to Ukarumpa for the four-week course. 

Participants and mentors devoted nearly 150 hours to linguistic analysis and drafting grammar for their languages, several of which had not previously been described by linguists. 

Participants collected texts during the course and entered them into a FLEX database, which they used to investigate the natural structure of their languages.