Collection of sound files for inclusion in a dictionary of Korana and eventual integration with a corpus of heritage texts.

Menan Du Plessis, University of Cape Town

Project Details:

Small Grant. Duration: 2011-2012. £7,880

Project Summary:

The project will collect sound files of Korana, or !Ora, a South African Khoesan language of the KHOE family, which may be the direct descendant of the variety spoken by inhabitants of the Cape when Europeans first arrived. It was believed extinct until the recent discovery of four elderly speakers around Bloemfontein and Kimberley. The files will be incorporated into an electronic dictionary, and ultimately integrated with a text corpus. This is part of a greater project to produce a compendium – in print and online - with historical background, grammatical information, heritage texts with parallel translations, and a dictionary.