Documentation of Ayere, an endangered and undocumented minority language of the Nigerian Middle Belt

Anja Moemeke-Choon, SOAS

Project Details:

Individual Graduate Studentship. Duration: 2007-2009. £29,659

Project Summary:

The purpose of this project is a documentation and description of Ayere, a minority language in Nigeria, which is highly threatened by Yoruba and mainly undocumented and undescribed. Work already existing on Ayere includes a word list and sketch vowel and consonant charts. The outcomes will be a short sociolinguistic description of Ayere, a sketch grammar, a trilingual dictionary Ayere-Yoruba-English of about 2,000 to 3,000 words and a collection of written and spoken language materials. These will be archived with ELAR as well as a local Nigerian archive. In the PhD thesis I will focus on the phonology of Ayere.