Teop belongs to the Oceanic branch of Austronesian languages. It is spoken on the island Bougainville, which belongs to Papua New Guinea. Estimates of the number of speakers range from 5,000 to 10,000.
If you’re interested in linguistics, then you’ll definitely benefit from the ability to read glosses. The fastest way to gain proficiency in linguistic glossing will be to finish the traditional Teop folk story by yourself. This may take a while but is far easiest than it seems! The story, together with other Teop exercises, can be found on the Interactive Map. Find Teop and many more languages there!
Gathering traditional stories and folk tales is one of the most popular methods of documenting a language. What are the other ones? In Chapter 10 of the Book of Knowledge you’ll read more about the work linguists and speech communities carry out when documenting languages. But you don’t necessarily have to be a linguist to document a language. Find out what you can do!
FURTHER INFORMATION AND RESOURCES
Read more and find samples at the website of the Teop Documentation Project: http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES/projects/teop.
