FYI, this news release from Michigan State University (US) at
http://www.newsroom.msu.edu/site/indexer/2839/content.htm was seen via a
Google alert. It is related to the funding story on AfricanLanguages message
#588 and MINEL message #369 ... DZO
MSU linguist to document threatened African language
Aug. 31, 2006
EAST LANSING, Mich. A Michigan State University linguistics and languages
researcher will spend the 2006-07 academic year in southern Tanzania, where
he will conduct research to help preserve Kikisi, one of the more than 120
languages spoken there and one that is currently facing the threat of
extinction.
Deogratias Ngonyani, associate professor in the Department of Linguistics
and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages, has been awarded a
research fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the
National Science Foundation as part of the agencies joint "Documenting
Endangered Languages" program. The program aims to create and preserve
records of languages threatened with extinction.
Ngonyani, who specializes in morphology or the study and description of word
formation, descriptive linguistics and African languages, is one of 12 U.S.
recipients of the fellowship. He will spend the academic year in the
southern highlands of Tanzania, where he will conduct research on Kikisi, a
Bantu language spoken by fewer than 10,000 people in four Kisi villages
(Lifuma, Lupingu, Makonde and Nindi) on the northeastern shore of Lake
Malawi.
"The project is based on the recognition that every language expresses a
unique culture and worldview," says Ngonyani, who has taught Swahili and
linguistics at MSU since 1999 and is a native speaker of Kindendeule,
another Tanzanian language.
He will survey the use of the Kikisi language and study its vocabulary and
linguistic features; write a descriptive grammar; create audio and video
recordings of folktales, conversations, rituals, songs, poems and language
games; transcribe oral traditions into written form for wider use in the
villages; and explore the nature of words in language using examples from
Kikisi.
By collecting data related to syntax and word structure, Ngonyanis research
will add invaluable data to the field of comparative Bantu linguistics and
clarify the relationship of Kikisi to other languages in southern Tanzania.
In addition, he will collaborate with colleagues based at the University of
Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Göteborg University (Sweden) on Languages of
Tanzania, a linguistic atlas of all languages in the country.
Experts estimate that more than half of the approximately 7,000 currently
used human languages are headed for extinction in the next hundred years.
Ngonyani notes that Kikisi is threatened by the increasing dominance of
Kiswahili (Swahili), which is the official language of Tanzania, and by
related languages with much larger numbers of speakers, including
Kinyakyusa, Kikinga, Kipangwa and Kimanda.
"The death of any language means the disappearance of knowledge and
linguistic data. So the documentation of endangered languages is part of a
global effort to preserve cultural diversity and to understand the very
nature of human communication," he said.
Ngonyani was born in Tanzania and received bachelors and masters degrees
from the University of Dar es Salaam before coming to the United States in
1991. He earned masters and doctoral degrees in linguistics from UCLA in
1996.
###
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AfricanLanguages/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AfricanLanguages/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
