2015 FEL Grant recipients

The Ngasa Folk (also known as the: Ongamo, Shaka, Ongg“amoni, Ongg“amo) - are a people found on the Eastern Slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro Region in Tanzania. Although the Ngasa population is said to be roughly 4,285, UNESCO considers Ngasa language as $ldquo;moribund”, with only 300-400 elderly speakers left. Ngasa language‘s use began diminishing in the 1950s. Currently, it‘s viewed as a secret language of a few elderly, partly due to fewer Ongamoni people willing to speak their language confidently in the open. Additionally, there has never been any documentation done on the Ngasa language to date. However, the elderly people (like my grandparents) have fought cultural and linguistic assimilation into dominant languages and cultures in vain.

The project Before They Pass Away will finally see the collection, recording and creation of audio, video, graphic and text documentation material covering the use of Ngasa language. The FEL Grant will help to collect and come up with a comprehensive record of the traditional, cultural and linguistic practices characteristic of the Ngasa speech community, taking into account their historical and personal accounts, Ngasa oral literature, folklore, fairytales, songs, poetry, proverbs, riddles, tongue twister and plays. For 12 months, Akinyi and two local technicians will work with Ngasa speakers, recording video, and producing audio, transcribing, analyzing and editing the collected materials and thus make it accessible for future use by the Ngasa community, their next generation and the linguistic community globally.

This project aims at documenting Fala, a small langauge spoken in Valverde del Fresno, Eljas and San Martín de Trevejo, three small villages in the northwestern part of Extremadura (Spain). In each village the language has its own name, namely Valverdeiru, Lagarteiru and Mañegu respectively. The differences in naming reflect not only the group identity of its speakers but also the phonetic, morphosyntactic and lexical differences that exist between the varieties of Fala spoken in each village. Thus, Fala is a general and unifying name for the three varieties that belong to the same language. Fala is spoken by approximately 4500 speakers of all ages. The documentation will comprise photos and 15 hours of audio and video recordings from selected local practices, with focus on endangered traditional work methods (agriculture, animal husbandry and household) and everyday language, and with special attention to generational differences. A preliminary dictionary will be also produced with wordlists from the domains of agriculture, animal husbandry and household, extracted from the primary data collected during fieldwork.

In 1981, the Wauja, a community of indigenous Arawak-speakers residing in the Amazon rainforest of Central Brazil, spoke almost no Portuguese. Children learned their own language from their elders at home. Today, children attend school, and are taught a bilingual curriculum. Now is the turning point, the moment when the ancestral language will be kept or lost.

Wauja elders recently convened a meeting to discuss the future of their language. In the summer of 2015, the Wauja will discuss a new project: their own online open-source Wauja-Portuguese dictionary, the first of its kind in their region, and probably one of the first in Brazil created by an entire language community, not just professional linguists.

This is a three-part project. Phase one, already well underway, is the development of a Wauja-English dictionary. Phase two, supported by this FEL grant, will document community feedback on the work done so far on the Wauja-English lexicon, and train young Wauja to begin developing a Wauja-Portuguese digital dictionary. A future phase three of the project, part of the overall language sustainability strategy, is development of a Wauja-Wauja dictionary in 2016.

This project aims at preservation and revitalization of Manchu language at Sanjiazi village, where Mandarin is the overwhelming language in media, administration and education. Manchu language may die out in the next 50 years, so its preservation and revitalization are extremely urgent. Specifically, this project will focus on: (1) a general survey of Manchu language at Sanjiazi village so as to prepare the relevant report in which the use of the language in various spheres of community life and the younger generation’s language shift will be observed and analyzed; (2) several workshops in the villages of Manchu language speakers and at one migration site of speakers far from the village, intended to raise the adult Manchu language speakers’ awareness about transmitting their mother tongue to the younger generations; and (3) publication of a booklet to introduce basic grammatical knowledge, words and phrases, and relevant information about Manchu language, which will be provided to the school teachers and grass roots cadres who may contribute most to the preservation and revitalization of the language. All materials produced will be bilingual in Chinese and English and available to community members, local school teachers, government officials, and academia.

The aim of this project is to spur the documentation of the highly endangered Miriwoong language, which is spoken fluently by no more than 20 elderly speakers in Western Australia. In particular, the project will describe the linguistic structures involved in expressing possession. During a field trip in 2014, data was gathered with the help of tasks and language games which encouraged speakers to produce sentences containing possessive constructions such as I have a big yellow bag, The didgeridoo belongs to the old man or The fish has many scales. The second fieldtrip in 2015 will be dedicated to clarifying questions arising during transcription and analysis of this data and carrying out revised versions of the games as well as new games with different speakers to allow for documenting possible variation in the language.

The data will mainly be gathered in the field since speakers are highly motivated and data quality improves greatly. Senior speakers in particular feel much more confident on their traditional country than in an office environment. Younger speakers also benefit from this language learning experience.

Apart from these field trips a follow-up training workshop on transcription will be offered. Its goal is to enhance transcription skills and encourage independence.

This project builds upon previous work to document the Kĩsêdjê language and its oral genres. Kĩsêdjê has roughly 350 speakers who live in 5 villages along the tributaries of the Suyá river, in the State of Mato Grosso, Brazil. The team, made up of two Kĩsêdjê speakers and a linguist, have so far produced a grammar sketch, an annotated speech corpus (narratives, interviews, songs and elicited sentences) and a short dictionary.

In this new phase of documentation, we will continue building the audiovisual corpus of Kĩsêdjê oral genres, and transcribe and translate the collected sessions. Elicitation sessions will be added to the existing Toolbox database of sentences, with the knowledge thus acquired incorporated into a grammar sketch. As audiovisual sessions get transcribed and translated, they will be added to the Toolbox database of sentences, to create interlinear annotation. The morphemes abstracted from the interlinear analyses of the elicitation and audiovisual sessions will be incorporated into the existing Toolbox database of lexical entries. Those products will be adapted into material for use by the Kĩsêdjê community and for use at the local indigenous school. Transcribed audiovisual sessions will also be adapted into reading materials for use at the school. The community has also expressed their interest in adapting the lexical database into a pedagogical dictionary.

Phuthi is a severely endangered Nguni language spoken by approximately 20,000 people in Lesotho and South Africa. The language has no official status and does not receive any governmental support. No standardised orthography has been developed for Phuthi and no written literature or mass media (print, radio or television) exists in the language. Phuthi is neither formally nor informally taught.

The Phuthi community have expressed great interest in a practical standard orthography for their language and in the development of teaching and learning materials. The envisaged project will lead to the development of a practical Phuthi orthography and to the production of an alphabet chart. The chart will be used by teachers and community members in their language teaching and learning efforts. The project supports Phuthi speakers to become literate in their language and encourages them to get involved in language revitalisation activities. The chart may also be sold to tourists and visitors, which will help to raise awareness among the visitors of the existence and historical importance of this language

Huasteca Potosina in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí is a multilingual region, the two largest indigenous groups being Nahuas and Teenek (Huastec). Indigenous languages are still spoken in the region but the domains of use have been reduced in recent decades. Languages are taught at primary schools but are not used in everyday conversations by younger people. Many speakers have negative attitudes towards indigenous languages and are using Spanish as preferred language of communication. Migrations of people and loosing of family ties are also a threat to the vitality of the indigenous languages.

The project intends to publish a book of local folk tales and legends from the region of Huasteca Potosina, and from the municipalities of Xilitla, Axtla and Matlapa in particular. The book will be a compilation of stories told by indigenous people about landmarks, people and deities. Stories will be recorded, transcribed, formatted to produce a printed book, with copies distributed among the local Nahua residents, libraries, schools, and culture centres. A compilation will also be available in digital form and as an audiobook. The publication is intended to raise awareness of local folklore and history and to boost Nahuatl language attitudes. Its main audience will be local Nahua community but also linguists, cultural anthropologists and those wanting to learn Nahuatl.

[Awaiting project description]

The project aims to develop materials for the revitalization and preservation efforts of the Waata language. The language is spoken by nearly 13,000 indigenous people living in territorial groups on the coast of Kenya. It is actively used in everyday conversations but there are concerns by community members that it is not being transmitted to the younger members who are increasingly turning to the neighbouring Pokomo and Kamba.

Three elders of the Waata community will work as language consultants and four younger members aged between 18-35 will be involved in making transcriptions and translations. Interviews and videos will be used as documentation tools. The project will result into an audio record and a published word list with at least 1200 items with example sentences. This publication will be designed to give phonological, semantic and syntactic information on everyday usage of Waata language. In additional the project will produce oral narratives including legends, proverbs, riddles, tongue twisters, origin stories and meaning of clan names, a one-hour documentary on Waata ways of life and a video footage, and photographs of traditional artefacts and important sites.

All the collected texts related to the Foundation Myth had been originally recorded in an analogue format, so they need to be converted into a digital format before being transcribed and translated into English: in fact, one of the aims of the project is to re-construct the “cognitive frame” of both Kiriwina and Kitawa local cultures by two interrelated processes: first, through the collection of some linguistic aspects of the culture (such as the texts of the Myth of Foundation) likely to disappear with the demise of the old generation, and their documentation; second, through this process, the identification, and analysis, of the various “mental mechanisms” which govern the production of various aspects of local culture.

The texts will be transcribed with the phonetic symbols (IPA Chart/Navlipi Alphabet) to establish the frequency and the correspondences of the lexemes used in these texts in order to establish their standardized form, both on the phonetic and the orthographic level. The second step will be the preparation of a Lexicon of the verbal expressions employed in the texts of the Foundation Myth, in such a way as to preserve and save a precious linguistic corpus as well as the “mental mechanisms” contained in such a corpus.