Monday 9 May, room 4421

Meet a team of fieldworkers: the DoBeS project "Pots, plants and people - a documentation of Baïnounk knowledge systems"

with Friederike Lüpke

Monday 9 May, room 4421,
12pm

This talk relates the experience of setting up an interdisciplinary research project and of collaborating with researchers from different disciplines and with the active Baïnounk cultural association BOREPAB, using examples of preliminary results from plant and pottery vocabulary. Read more ...

Jaminjung

with Candide Simard

Monday 9 May, room 4421
2pm

Candide is a graduate of the MA in Language Documentatin and Description, her PhD described the prosodic system of Jaminjung, an endangered language of the Victoria River District in the Northern Territory of Australia. In this talk Candide will talk about her experiences working with the Jaminjung speakers, particularly in documentating their knowledge about the plants and animals of the area.

Sitting in a shady spot:
Candide with the consultants E. Raymond and her daughter, Judy M. and Josie J.

Tuesday 10 May, room 4421

Cicipu - spoken in Nigeria

with Stuart McGill

Tuesday 10 May, room 4421
12pm

Cicipu is one of several hundred languages spoken in the savannah of the Nigerian Middle Belt. Like many of these languages, younger speakers are shifting to the much larger Hausa language. In this session we will learn some Cicipu greetings and other phrases, discover some of the more unusual aspects of the language, and find out about recent indigenous documentation and language support efforts.

Stuart recording Murna Musa from Korisino

Wednesday 11 May, room 4421

Medefaidrin - spoken in Nigeria

with Eno-Abasi Urua

Wednesday 11 May, room 4421
12pm

In order to preserve the Medefaidrin language of the Oberi Okaime community, the Department of Linguistics & Nigerian Languages of the University of Uyo, Nigeria is promoting and supporting the language revitalisation efforts of Medefaidrin. This is done with language documentation projects, including scanning old handwritten texts, development of a multilingual e-dictionary and research projects by staff and graduate students of the Department. Read more ...

Thursday 12 May, Brunei Suite

Endangered Sign Languages

with Ulrike Zeshan

Thursday 12 May, in the Brunei Suite
11am

The International Institute for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies has been leading work on the documentation of small-scale sign languages in village communities with hereditary deafness. The situation in these "deaf villages" is unique because, unlike the communities of urban Deaf signers, the whole community is involved in creating and maintaining the indigenous sign languages. Therefore, both deaf and hearing people in these villages use sign languages in everyday life, and there is no communication barrier between deaf and hearing people.

The presentation focuses on two of the these village sign languages we are studying:

Alipur Village Sign Language is used in the village of Alipur in South India, where there are 140 deaf people among a population of over 10,000. This is a Muslim Shia enclave where marriages have taken place within the village for generations, resulting in hereditary deafness. Our research has led to the creation of a "Unity School for the Deaf", where deaf children now have access to formal education through their village sign language for the first time.

The small village of Chican on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico has 17 deaf people of all ages out of over 500. We are working with the village community on the linguistic documentation of their unique language, including work on a multi-language dictionary. Both research projects are led by deaf researchers from India and Mexico respectively.

See also http://www.uclan.ac.uk/schools/journalism_media_communication/islands/villagesign/index.php

Please contact us at elap@soas.ac.uk if you require an interpreter for this event

The Cornish language and its Survival

with Mick Paynter

Thursday 12 May, in the Brunei Suite
12pm

Kernewek is one of six living Celtic languages which are found in two linguistic groups. Cornish together with Welsh and Breton forms the Brythonic group and Manx Gaelic, Irish and Scots Gaelic are the Goidelic languages.

Cornish, a language which was under pressure for centuries and was on the verge of extinction has staged a remarkable come back. UNESCO who reported recently that the language was indeed extinct has now recanted, stating that if it were so for the traditional language it is definitely not the case for the revived language which it described as growing constantly. UNESCO is now considering changing the categories it use in describing endangered languages and their condition.

As a result of its recognition by the European Union an consequential support from UK government and Cornwall Council there has been an upsurge of support for and interest in the language in recent years. There is now a Language Office within Cornwall Council which works to promote the language in schools and in public life. Cornish is already taught in some schools, there is an existing kindergarten using the language and a movement to expand this work. A growing modern literature competes with traditional texts for the readers attention. The language is well catered for in film and recordings.

The Cornish language is increasingly seen as the badge Cornwall's distinct cultural identity and is central to the struggle to express it.

Book launch! Mick will be launching his new book "A Worm's Folly; poems in Cornish" at 12.30pm in the Brunei Suite

Great Andamanese

with Anvita Abbi

Thursday 12 May, in the Brunei Suite
1pm

Anvita Abbi, Leverhulme visiting professor and author of Birds of the Great Andamanese, will be talking about the Andaman Islands. Copies of her book will also be available to view / purchase. Read more ...

Social dynamics, status and education of the Basque language: An introduction.

with Joseba Iñaki Lopez de Luzuriaga

Thursday 12 May, in the Brunei Suite
2pm

A quick overview of the Basque language's development in the Basque society during the last decades along with a practical introduction to the Basque language and the Basque Society of London. Read more ...

Juchiteco - spoken in southern Mexico

with Gabriela Pérez Báez

Thursday 12 May, in the Brunei Suite
3pm

Curator of Linguistics at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. Gabriela has conducted research on Zapotec languages since 2002. She has devoted much of her work to studying factors of language maintenance and endangerment with a focus on the impact of emigration on the community of speakers of San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec and the influence its mirror community in Los Angeles, California has on the survival prospects of this language.

Juchiteco is a Zapotec language of the Otomanguean stock of Mesoamerican languages. It is spoken in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca, Mexico. Juchiteco is fascinating in that is has preserved important sound traits that provide us with insights into what the ancestral language common to all Zapotec languages might have sounded like. Juchiteco has also provided important data about whether language influences the way humans conceptualize the space around them. In this presentation, we will talk about the structure of the language, the culture of its speakers, and what the language is teaching us about the inner-workings on the human mind.

New Caledonia

with Aurélie Cauchard

Thursday 12 May, in the Brunei Suite
4pm

Aurélie Cauchard, ELDP grantee and PhD student at the University of Manchester, will be talking about her experiences working with Caac in New Caledonia, having returned from her first fieldtrip to New Caledonia in March 2011.

Caac is the language of the Mwâlebeng people who live on the north-eastern coast of New Caledonia, in the village of Pouébo. It is an endangered language spoken by approximately one thousand speakers. During this session, I will present the Caac community, their environment and culture, and share some observations (resulting from a preliminary fieldwork in Pouébo) on the speaker's attitudes towards their language and the factors that may endanger the transmission process. The session will focus more specifically on the prestige of 'old Caac' and the consequent linguistic 'inhibition' of young speakers but also the local efforts to document their language and the creative resources of the community. The presentation will be an opportunity to address two main obstacles to the vitality of the language of Pouébo i.e. the fear of language change by older generations and the passive knowledge of the language by the younger generation, and eventually think about the role a documentation project in this context.

Friday 13 May, room 4421

Baïnounk Gubëeher

with Alex cobinnah

Fri 13 May, room 4421
12pm

We will take a look at issues of multilingualism and language contact and try to find out how people deal with this situation and how they manage to maintain their language. We will also look at and listen to some audio and video material and have the occasion to learn how to greet people in Gubëeher, in case you ever make it to Djibonker! Read more ...

Gamilaraay - spoken in southeast Australia

with Peter Austin

Friday 13 May, room 4421
1pm

Gamilaraay is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken by the Kamilaroi people over a large area in the north-west of New South Wales. After a tragic history of language loss, Gamilaraay (together with the related Yuwaalaraay language) is now being revived and is being taught in schools and used for a growing range of functions. We will look at the sociolinguistic situation, current revival activities and learn some basic words and everyday expressions.

"The Ju/'hoan Transcription Group in 2006: Transcribers, Trainees, and Storytellers"

with Megan Biesele

Friday 13 May, room 4421
2pm

The Ju/'hoan Transcription Group (JTG) began in Namibia in 2002, using solar power and ExpressScribe software to transcribe material collected as long ago as 1970. This is a 17-minute video about the state of the JTG in 2006, the first year that electricity became available to the project in a community library.

In 2007 the Ju/'hoan transcribers learned ELAN and now, in 2011, they are working much more rapidly and have their own quarters adjacent to the library. The JTG has become a community focus for literate activities including political letter-writing, land rights history, and documentation. More girls and women have also became involved.

The project operates under the direction of the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, the Ju/'hoan community organization.

Photo of the Ju/'hoan Transcription Group 2006

Corpora in AfroAsiatic Languages

with Amina Mettouchi, Christian Chanard and Graziano Savà

Friday 13 May, room 4421
3pm

Amina is Professor of Berber Linguistics, she works on spontaneous spoken data, and is interested in all linguistic aspects of oral production. She is currently coordinating a corpus project on spoken Afroasiatic languages (CORPAFROAS, http://web.me.com/aminamettouchi/CORPAFROAS/Home.html), funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, which will be the topic of the presentation.

Christian is an engineer in information technology at the CNRS, he specializes on the development of tools for field linguistics. He is the technical coordinator of the CorpAfroAs project.

Graziano Savà is a member of the CorpAfroAs project, contributing on Ts'amakko, a Cushitic language. He has first-hand experience in endangered languages, he recently received an ELDP Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship for the project "The Documentation of Ongota: A Linguistic Isolate of a Hunter-Gatherer Community in Southwest Ethiopia

Amina, Christian and Graziano will present their data, their collection and annotation method, and the software (based on ELAN) developed within the project, which allows the morphosyntactic annotation of prosodically segmented spoken data in the field.

photo by Graziano