Cicipu documentation: five festivals of the Acipu people

Stuart McGill, School of Oriental and African Studies

Project Details:

Small Grant. Duration: 2011-2011. £5,457

Project Summary:

This project aims to augment an existing corpus of the Cicipu language, spoken by approximately 20,000 people in northwest Nigeria (ISO 639-3 awc, co-ordinates roughly 11.0 N, 5.6 E). The project will concentrate on the five major Acipu festivals held on Korisino mountain. Data collected will include songs, speeches, interviews with participants, descriptions of the festivals, and discussion of the symbolism involved and implications for those who take part. A major part of the project is the training of two community members in documentation techniques, in order to provide the language community with a certain amount of self-sufficiency with respect to language documentation.