The documentation of Ambel, an Austronesian language of Eastern Indonesia

Ambel is an undocumented Austronesian language spoken in the Raja Ampat archipelago in West Papua, Indonesia. There are an estimated 300 speakers. Younger generations are no longer learning the language, and Papuan Malay, the local lingua franca, is increasingly used as the language of everyday communication in traditionally Ambel-speaking villages. The aim of this project is to build an extensive audio-visual archive of Ambel, representative of a wide variety of genres. This corpus will form the basis of a grammatical description of Ambel for submission as a PhD dissertation, as well as a trilingual lexicon (Ambel-Indonesian-English).