Language Documentation and Description in Africa

Keywords

language endangerment, language death, language revitalization, language documentation, culture documentation, language description, archiving, dissemination, Bantu, Africa

Position of the course

This course provides a broad introduction to language documentation and description, a new sub-discipline within linguistics, with special attention to the African languages. A recent international handbook is being used as guide (Boerger et al. 2020); during the classes the examples are taken from the experiences of the BantUGent research group.

Contents

• Part 1: Theory

  Lesson 1 – Language endangerment, language death and language revitalization: What?
  Lesson 2 – Language and culture documentation: What?
  Lesson 3 – Themes, motivations and ethical aspects

• Part 2: A language and culture documentation project

  Lesson 4 – Planning of a documentation project
  Lesson 5 – The documentary corpus and archive

• Part 3: Equipment and software

  Lesson 6 – Equipment
  Lesson 7 – Software

• Part 4: Fieldwork

  Lesson 8 – Data management and elicitation
  Lesson 9 – Hands-on fieldwork I
  Lesson 10 – Hands-on fieldwork II
  Lesson 11 – Hands-on fieldwork III

• Part 5: Post-field processing

  Lesson 12 – Archiving, description, publication and dissemination