The sounds of Papua. This study investigates speech in the Papuan languages spoken to the immediate north of Australia, which have very simple consonant and vowel systems, but which have been consiste

Description

The sounds of Papua. This study investigates speech in the Papuan languages spoken to the immediate north of Australia, which have very simple consonant and vowel systems, but which have been consistently reported as showing a very high level of language-internal variability. The New Guinea area is recognised as having the highest language diversity in the world, yet the sound systems of its languages are greatly under-studied. This project aims to produce the first ever large-scale phonetic studies of these superficially simple sound systems of Papuan languages. This is expected to provide a better understanding of human speech production in general. In addition, online dictionaries are planned based on the sound recordings from this project. . Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4704 - Linguistics. Lead: Prof Marija Tabain