The Nisvai Corpus of Oral Narrative Practices from Malekula (Vanuatu) and its Associated Language Resources

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 2649–2656 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 2649 The Nisvai Corpus of Oral Narrative Practices from Malekula (Vanuatu) and its Associated Language Resources Jocelyn Aznar1, N´uria Gala2 1Aix Marseille Universit´e, EHESS, CREDO 2Aix Marseille Universit´e, Laboratoire Parole et Langage, LPL CNRS UMR 7309 contact@jocelynaznar.eu, nuria.gala@univ-amu.fr Abstract In this paper, we present a corpus of oral narratives from the Nisvai linguistic community and four associated language resources. Nisvai is an oral language spoken by 200 native speakers in the South-East of Malekula, an island of Vanuatu, Oceania. This language had never been the focus of a research before the one leading to this article. The corpus we present is made of 32 annotated narratives segmented into intonation units. The audio records were transcribed using the written conventions specifically developed for the language and translated into French. Four associated language resources have been generated by organizing the annotations into written documents: two of them are available online and two in paper format. The online resources allow the users to listen to the audio recordings while reading the annotations. They were built to share the results of our fieldwork and to communicate on the Nisvai narrative practices with the researchers as well as with a more general audience. The bilingual paper resources, a booklet of narratives and a Nisvai-French French-Nisvai lexicon, were designed for the Nisvai community by taking into account their future uses (i.e. primary school). Keywords: Nisvai, Vanuatu, language resources, oral language, narrative practices, annotated corpora 1. Introduction The Nisvai language is spoken by a community of around 200 native speakers in the South-East of the Malekula is- land, in Vanuatu. Prior to the work that we present in this paper, the Nisvai had not been subject of a research study. A lexical survey of 19 languages of the South of Malekula was conducted (Charpentier, 1984) and resulted in an linguistic Atlas of 3900 lexical items in each of those languages, plus its translation in French, English and Bislama (the Vanuatu vehicular language). During his linguistic survey, Charp- entier (1984) counted only 20 native speakers of Nisvai, but he acknowledged that the language was understood and could be spoken by around 720 people in the area. This ob- servation reveals the local status of the Nisvai: apart from Charpentier’s atlas, very little information on this linguistic community is available, except some comments by Lynch et al. (2001) on the number of speakers, or Guiart (2011), who wrote some notes during a fieldwork in 1950 about the number of inhabitants and the name of their villages, or Charpentier, in Simeoni’s geographical atlas (Sim´eoni, 2009), who commented on the increase of the Nisvai popu- lation (he compared with the data he collected in 1984). The fieldwork leading to the production of the resources for the Nisvai language presented in this paper was undertaken from 2012 to 2015 with the support of the local …

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