Modelling Pacific Creole Languages

The project will build spoken-language corpora (collections of recorded speech) in the three main English-based Pacific creoles: Tok Pisin (PNG), Pijin (Solomon Islands) and Bislama (Vanuatu). The main goal is to assist potential users, eg from Australian defence, to develop tools, based on naturalistic speech in these creoles, which can be used to communicate with locals in case of such emergencies as disaster relief operations. For each creole, material will be recorded, transcribed and translated by working with a range of speakers.