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Working with endangered languages in Tanzani and Cameroon
Indigenous Peoples Issues & Resources has drawn our attention to two recently published articles on endangered African languages.
Cameroon: Cultural Ecologies Of Endangered Languages: The Cases Of Wawa And Njanga Sascha Sebastian Griffiths, and Laura Robson, 2010
The study of endangered languages can reveal interesting information about how languages adapt to changes in the environment of their speakers and particularly to changes in their culture. This article introduces two understudied Cameroonian languages at different stages of endangerment: Wawa (endangered) and Njanga (moribund). Njanga has been replaced by a related dialect (Sundani) and Wawa is threatened by the dominant Fulfulde language and is undergoing gradual and unexpected changes in reaction to the threat. A language ecology perspective is employed to examine data on numerals, color terms, and days of the week.
Anthropological Linguistics; 52(2): 217 - 238
Source: Indigenous Peoples Issues & Resources website
Tanzania: Recollecting Words And Expressions In Aasá, A Dead Language In Tanzania, Sara Petrollino, and Maarten Mous, 2010
Aasá, a Cushitic language, was formerly spoken by a hunter-gatherer community that constitutes a servant group to the Maasai in northern Tanzania. Given that none of the ethnic Aasá surveyed in this study had ever spoken this language, their memory of it is remarkable and raises questions about how it is remembered. In this article, we consider what our corpus of collected data reveals about the patterns of recollection of Aasá and compare these patterns with similar instances of lexical retrieval in second-language attrition. The divergent recollection patterns identified in our study can be explained within the context of the historical reconstruction of language shift from Aasá to Maasai. We conclude that the data collected represent the vestiges of a stage of the shift at which Aasá was no longer a full-fledged language.
Anthropological Linguistics; 52(2): 206 - 216
Source: Indigenous Peoples Issues & Resources website
