Sonja Riesberg receives first DELAMAN Franz Boas Award

DELAMAN is delighted to announce that the first DELAMAN Franz Boas Award has been given to Sonja Riesberg for her work on the CELD Papua corpus, containing languages from the Indonesian provinces Papua Barat and Papua. The large multilingual collection contains a variety of languages, is rich in video recordings, includes legacy material, and had strong community involvement in transcription and annotation. It is an outstanding example of a large collaborative effort with a junior researcher at the core.

The committee had a very difficult task in evaluating the collections because all of them were highly deserving. Each collection in itself was an outstanding example of a major contribution to the preservation of endangered languages and to the field of linguistics and ethnography and most importantly to language documentation.

Two decades after the documentation movement gained momentum, we now have exemplary rich multimedia documentary collections of endangered languages which will serve as models for junior scholars embarking on documentation projects.

These early career scholars have created lasting records of languages and thereby implemented the vision of how to document a language. This contribution in itself is a step toward making collections themselves a major element in the evaluation of the academic contribution of a scholar to the field.

DELAMAN is also delighted to announce the following four Honorable Mentions from the award competition:

Christian Döhler, Komnzo (Papua New Guinea)

Darja Hoenigman, Awiakay (Papua New Guinea)

Justin D. McIntosh, Teotepec Eastern Chatino (Mexico)

Kilu von Prince, Daakaka (Vanuatu)