Nafsan, a language from central Vanuatu: Time depth and variability in a corpus spanning 160 years

Abstract

This paper illustrates the process of creating a citable and reusable corpus of a small language that has previously had little recorded material available. The Nafsan language is spoken in the villages of Erakor, Pango, and Eratap in south Efate, central Vanuatu. The corpus described here has been developed since I began fieldwork in the mid-1990s. The initial effort was to build a citable corpus of transcripts for use in the grammar so that the grammar was a point of entry to the corpus, and to establish a foundation for future re-use of the materials with the transcripts as points of entry to linked media. Subsequently the corpus has expanded with the addition of scanned historical manusc..