Sakun (Sukur) Language Documentation Project

Michael Thomas, University of Colorado, Boulder

Project Details:

Individual Graduate Studentship. Duration: 2010-2011. £29,993

Project Summary:

The Sakun (Sukur) Language Documentation Project will provide a discourse-based corpus of an endangered and undocumented language of the Mandara mountains, Nigeria. Sakun is spoken by approximately 15,000 people. Since the enlistment of Sukur in 1999 as a UNESCO Cultural Landscape, the increased contact following infrastructure development has caused Sakun to give way to Hausa in a number of domains. Working with local stakeholders, this project will assemble a corpus that captures a broad range of cultural practices identified as important by the community, and provide the foundation for a grammar, dictionary and pedagogical materials to support the community’s own efforts at language maintenance.