Speaking documentation of an endangered Jukunoid language

The project will document and classify a lesser-known, endangered (Southern) Jukunoid languages: Yukuben (spoken mainly in eastern Nigeria, but also across the border in Cameroon). The area is mountainous and difficult to reach, and the security situation is tense due to ethnic rivalry. Previous fieldwork on the language has therefore been quite brief and superficial. However, we are confident that, based on the previous experience of the researchers, the fieldwork can be conducted successfully. Four field trips are planned, and a corpus of up to 200 hours of audio and 100 hours of video recordings will be acquired, as a basis for the first comprehensive, in-depth description and documentation of a Jukunoid language and culture. Social variables will also receive due attention. Two sets of comparable recordings will be made (by a male and a female researcher respectively) covering a wide range of age groups, social groups, and both genders. In this way, primary data will be acquired for the still largely unexplored area of socially and gender-determined language variation in African languages. Particular emphasis is placed on acquiring high-quality audio recordings of all materials, plus relevant video recordings of verbal interactions. This material is to be labelled, tagged, transcribed and made available to the academic community on the internet in the form of an electronic speaking database (XML), accessible via linguistic, ethnological or social/gender criteria. The database will contain a) linguistically structured material documenting the structure of the language on all levels (phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic), and b) a collection of video sequences of both general and specific verbal interactions such as greetings, buying and selling, story-telling; weddings, initiation, funerals. Its design is open-ended, to allow cumulative additions by the project team or by others in the future, and will be co-ordinated with other international language documentation databases currently being developed.

The project will document and classify a lesser-known, endangered (Southern) Jukunoid languages: Yukuben (spoken mainly in eastern Nigeria, but also across the border in Cameroon). The area is mountainous and difficult to reach, and the security situation is tense due to ethnic rivalry. Previous fieldwork on the language has therefore been quite brief and superficial. However, we are confident that, based on the previous experience of the researchers, the fieldwork can be conducted successfully. Four field trips are planned, and a corpus of up to 200 hours of audio and 100 hours of video recordings will be acquired, as a basis for the first comprehensive, in-depth description and documentation of a Jukunoid language and culture. Social variables will also receive due attention. Two sets of comparable recordings will be made (by a male and a female researcher respectively) covering a wide range of age groups, social groups, and both genders. In this way, primary data will be acquired for the still largely unexplored area of socially and gender-determined language variation in African languages. Particular emphasis is placed on acquiring high-quality audio recordings of all materials, plus relevant video recordings of verbal interactions. This material is to be labelled, tagged, transcribed and made available to the academic community on the internet in the form of an electronic speaking database (XML), accessible via linguistic, ethnological or social/gender criteria. The database will contain a) linguistically structured material documenting the structure of the language on all levels (phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic), and b) a collection of video sequences of both general and specific verbal interactions such as greetings, buying and selling, story-telling; weddings, initiation, funerals. Its design is open-ended, to allow cumulative additions by the project team or by others in the future, and will be co-ordinated with other international language documentation databases currently being developed.