The linguistics department at the Uni of Newcastle
has a really strong focus on 
endangered language documentation
and that really inspired me to want to do something like that myself.
As part of my Bachelor of Arts, I was able to travel
to the island of Emae in Vanuatu in 2017 for a month and work on a small project
with two villages on the island who speak a particular language not spoken by any other area.
Now, I'm doing my PhD so I was able to go back for seven and a half months last year,
doing the same kinds of work but more intensive and for a much longer time.
We recorded with old people, young people, people who were first language speakers, who were second language speakers.
That was the first part of the project but the second part
was working with a smaller team
to create a comprehensive and lasting
corpus of the language of Emae
and also to make that available to generations in
the future.
