Sirva is spoken by maybe 250 people in the four villages of Kamambu, Kumbuna, Musita, and Sileibi, all located around the upper reaches of the Gogol River. In Kamambu village, where I worked in 2012, only adults over 30 could use the language. Everyone else could only understand it. If the situation is the same in other villages—and it probably is—then it is likely that the language will stop being spoken in a couple generations.
The first linguist to encounter Sirva was John Z’graggen, who collected a wordlist and a little grammatical information in the early 1970’s. Since then, the only work on the language that I know of is mine. I recorded a wordlist with Kelly Amansi at Usino Station in 2006; I worked with the Kamambu community—especially Kelly and his brother Bava—for two weeks in 2012; and I did a little more elicitation with Kelly in town in 2014. Altogether, the community and I have recorded 80 minutes of spoken Sirva, about 56 minutes of which are transcribed. We’ve also recorded nearly 10 hours of grammar and vocabulary elicitation.
Kelly died in 2015. With his passing, the world lost a compassionate, intelligent, and knowledgeable man. Below is a song that Kelly and his wife Kimdas wrote and performed in Tok Pisin, called “Papa Mi Gaden Bilong Yu,” or “Father I’m Your Garden.”
The first linguist to encounter Sirva was John Z’graggen, who collected a wordlist and a little grammatical information in the early 1970’s. Since then, the only work on the language that I know of is mine. I recorded a wordlist with Kelly Amansi at Usino Station in 2006; I worked with the Kamambu community—especially Kelly and his brother Bava—for two weeks in 2012; and I did a little more elicitation with Kelly in town in 2014. Altogether, the community and I have recorded 80 minutes of spoken Sirva, about 56 minutes of which are transcribed. We’ve also recorded nearly 10 hours of grammar and vocabulary elicitation.
Kelly died in 2015. With his passing, the world lost a compassionate, intelligent, and knowledgeable man. Below is a song that Kelly and his wife Kimdas wrote and performed in Tok Pisin, called “Papa Mi Gaden Bilong Yu,” or “Father I’m Your Garden.”