Dictionary & Coffee Tuesdays in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea

For the past year, Cairns Institute Adjunct Professor Craig Volker has been hosting “Nalik Dictionary Coffee Nights” every Tuesday at his home in Madina Village, New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. This is part of his work to compile the first dictionary of Nalik, an indigenous language spoken by between 4000 – 5000 people, but which is increasingly not passed on to children.

The nights are open to anyone from the community. Attendance fluctuates from two to twelve people, depending on the weather and conflicting community and clan events. The most regular attendees are elder clan leaders and matriarchs, but some younger people also attend. For the younger people, the sessions offer an opportunity to learn words that they would no longer hear in daily conversation, as elders reminisce about practices or events they remember from the past or talk about specialised vocabulary used in ceremonies.

The evenings started last year when Volker was asking people about vocabulary to include in the dictionary and several people suggested getting together as a group to verify words that they used or that they half remembered their grandparents using in the past. In the first evening, participants quickly learned that rather than teaching Volker words for him to include in the dictionary, the evenings provide an opportunity for people to learn from each other, not only about words, but about the traditional knowledge associated with the words.

The evenings usually start with questions by Volker about a particular topic, such as “How do you say X in Nalik?”,  “When you do X, how do you describe it to someone in Nalik?”, or “What's the name of this bird in Nalik?”. The participants then take up the topic and start to tell stories about it or argue about the correct pronunciation of a word. Volker says that he is often hard pressed to keep up with the new words in the conversation and sometimes has to call for time out to catch up. He says that as anyone who is familiar with New Ireland culture would expect, the evening quickly turns to laughter and jokes, which provide a rich source for even more words for the dictionary.

A draft version of the dictionary, which includes the many questions that still exist for some words, appears on the Cairns Institute Language Archive website. It is updated regularly. A final print version of the dictionary will be developed from this draft once elders agree that enough words have been collected and Volker has been able to analyse the grammatical and semantic characteristics of all the words. Volker estimates this May take another five years.

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