New Britain Survey: Working

So, you know I recently helped to survey four languages on New Britain Island... but do you know what I actually did during the three weeks?

The team and I spent much of time talking to people and waiting for things to happen, but the main objective of our work was doing sociolinguistic research (i.e. to find out about the culture and language of each place we visited).

To do this research, we get a group of people together and ask them questions. On this survey, I did these kind of interviews with groups about their contact with other groups - where and how much do they travel, do people from other areas marry into their village, or people from their village marry to other areas, etc. (I also interviewed church leaders in each village - look for more about this in future posts.)

People are usually very interested in meeting us and talking to us, so it's usually not hard to get a big group of people together (in the early morning). If you're trying to get a group of people together later in the day, it can be hard, because everyone has canoed from the island to work in their gardens on the mainland!

Often when we're talking with groups of people, we draw a huge crowd. Can you see Juliann (my teammate) in this picture? She's in the middle of the group - write down a phonetic wordlist in the Apalik language. (If you look closely, you can see a white arm in the middle of the picture.)