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Introduction
David Blundell
ECAI Pacific Language Mapping Project Editor: pacific@berkeley.edu
Languages included in this Atlas cover about
one third of the world's 6,000 languages. The regions of the
Pacific, Southeast Asia (apart from Burma), and Madagascar
are documented. By the end of this century most of these languages
will be extinct, thus limiting our ability to comprehend the
diversity of human experience.
The importance of ECAI mapping these languages
and cultures, whether on a single island or across the vastness
of Oceania, is to geographically view layers of data through
time. This process allows for geo-referenced data to be accessible
with the ability to electronically connect, display, share,
and analyze materials.
ECAI Pacific Language Mapping is a result
of the ECAI Austronesia Team that was initiated by Prof. Lewis
Lancaster, founder and director of ECAI, at the Conference
on Austronesian Studies in Taiwan--Retrospect and Prospect,
held at UC Berkeley in 1997. The ECAI Austronesia Team started
from this conference on linguistics, history, anthropology,
and archaeology as a digital mapping project. Digital language
mapping continued in Taiwan by Paul
Li resulting in his publications 2000 and 2001. Projects
continued to gradually include Southeast Asia with projects
of GIS in Hainan, China, by Christian
Anderson (2003) and a demonstration of geographic search
for Cebuano language sources in the central Philippines by
Michael
Buckland (2002).
The ECAI Austronesia Team obtained copyright
permission from the Australian Academy of the Humanities to
create and distribute digital versions of their materials
contained in the Language Atlas of the Pacific Area (Wurm,
S. A., and S. Hattori, 1981 and 1983, Canberra: Australian
Academy of the Humanities in collaboration with the Japan
Academy).
The ECAI Digital Pacific Language Map spans
the extent of Pacific languages including Austronesian languages,
Papuan languages, Australian aboriginal languages, and the
Austro-Asiatic languages of Southeast Asia. Others such as
trade, pidgin, and continental languages are represented as
related to Pacific language regions.
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