Documentation of Baskeet song, verbal art and ceremonial language

Yvonne Treis, LLCAN

Project Details:

Individual Postgraduate Fellowship. Duration: 2011-2013. £128,042

Project Summary:

Baskeet (bst) is a little known Omotic language spoken by about 60,000 speakers at the fringes of the Ethiopian highlands in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples' Region of Ethiopia (6.34N 36.61 E). The project focuses on the linguistic and ethnographic documentation of endangered literary genres, namely songs, poems, prayers and ceremonial speech, which are being abandoned in the course of rapid socio-cultural changes. The project will, firstly, produce a multi-media documentation (text, audio, video) of these culturally emblematic endangered domains and, secondly, contribute to a longer-range project of an extensive documentation of Baskeet with a dictionary at its core.