My very own local paper, the Oxford Mail, reports today on the efforts of Jim Hewitt, a community worker who is helping immigrants from East Timor to settle in Blackbird Leys, a suburb of Oxford. To help some of the newcomers he is compiling his own Fataluku-English dictionary because a proportion of the East Timorese have been struggling. Fataluku is very different from Tetun, East Timor's main language, and as a result the Fataluku speakers feel additionally marginalised from the local community.
Mr Hewitt's efforts have been published on the internet and is being used by the Fataluku Language Project, in conjunction with Leiden University Centre for Linguistics in the Netherlands. They are trying to create a written version for the language, which currently only exists in spoken form.
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