The Nisvai Corpus of Oral Narrative Practices from Malekula (Vanuatu) and its Associated Language Resources

In this paper, we present a corpus of oral narratives from the Nisvai linguistic community and four associated language resources. Nisvai is an oral language spoken by 200 native speakers in the South-East of Malekula, an island of Vanuatu, Oceania. This language had never been the focus of a research before the one leading to this article. The corpus we present is made of 32 annotated narratives segmented into intonation units. The audio records were transcribed using the written conventions specifically developed for the language and translated into French. Four associated language resources have been generated by organizing the annotations into written documents: two of them are available online and two in paper format. The online resources allow the users to listen to the audio recordings while reading the annotations. They were built to share the results of our fieldwork and to communicate on the Nisvai narrative practices with the researchers as well as with a more general audience. The bilingual paper resources, a booklet of narratives and a Nisvai-French French-Nisvai lexicon, were designed for the Nisvai community by taking into account their future uses (i.e. primary school).