Wooi

Project Statistics

  • Sessions: 263
  • Audio recordings: 265
  • Video recordings: 247
  • Annotations: 125
  • Images: 1

Last update: 2017-6-18

Wooi is the name of both the language and the people settling in three villages at the western tip of Yapen Island, Indonesia. Wooi is classified as Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, South Halmahera-West New Guinea, South Halmahera-Geelvink Bay, Geelvink Bay, Yapen, Central Western (see Grimes 1988). Approximately 1600 people still speak Wooi; the language is claimed to have 77% lexical similarity with neighboring Pom, Marau, and Ansus. Many of the 700 languages spoken in Indonesia are currently endangered. Most of them in the far eastern provinces of the archipelago, an area inhabited by only 1% of Indonesia’s population, but comprising about 60% of the country’s speech communities. Because of this diversity and the urgent situation, the Wooi project aims not only at documenting one language, but at establishing sustainable structures for language documentation in Indonesian Papua as well.