Farming, food and yam: language and cultural practices among Ikaan speakers

Sophie Salffner, SOAS

Project Details:

Individual Postgraduate Fellowship. Duration: 2011-2013. £117,618

Project Summary:

Ikaan, a dialect of Ukaan, is spoken in two villages in south-western Nigeria. This project will investigate phonetic and phonological variation among speakers based on a documentation of language around, knowledge of and practices in food, food production and farming, with a special focus on the New Yam Festival. Data will be collected by a linguist, a visual anthropologist and community members themselves. Project outputs include an annotated audiovisual documentation corpus with data from a wide range of speakers, but also an anthropological visual map and a series of short documentary films around the festival.