Artist Mary Kuper will present a series of paintings on colour terms in different languages with the title ‘The Colour of Words’ at this year’s Bloomsbury Festival. The Bloomsbury Festival 2020 takes place from the 16th to the 25th of October as a range of digital, outdoor and gallery events. Many of the events are free and you can book on each event page. View the entire programme here.
By Andrew Harvey and Richard Griscom Of the services that the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) provides, their Documentation Trainings have to be one of the most valuable. Intensive, practically-oriented crash-courses, trainees often begin the events with little or no knowledge of how to document a language, and will, after many days of hard work and trial-and-error, finish the events with the acumen and confidence necessary to engage in the
Today on the ELAR blog, we are featuring ELDP grantee Xuan Guan’s project ‘Documentation of Queyu (Choyo) and its Cultural Traditions‘. Queyu is an understudied and underdocumented Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, China. Queyu belongs to the Qiangic branch, with approximately 6,000~7,000 speaker population. Xuan’s ELAR collection ‘Documentation of Queyu (Choyo) and its Cultural Traditions’ can be accessed here. Impact on community/speakers highlight Yajiang is located in the
This week on the ELAR Blog, ELDP Grantee Kristina Gallego writes about the linguistic landscape of Babuyan Claro. Kristina’s ELAR Collection ‘Consequences of contact: Documenting Ibatan within the multilingual landscape of Babuyan Claro’ can be accessed here. By Kristina Gallego Babuyan Claro is an island community in the far north of the Philippines, and it is the home of the Ibatans, a small group of people with a complex contact history.
A few weeks ago we introduced a new SOAS World Languages Institute project on the ELAR Blog: virALLanguages. Before the ELAR Blog goes on its summer break, here’s an update on how virALLanguages has evolved over the last couple of months. virALLanguages is a volunteer-run project initiated by the SOAS World Languages Institute and the KPAAM-CAM Project at the University of Buffalo, SUNY. The project facilitates the production of videos containing
This week on the ELAR blog, ELDP grantee Kristian Roncero introduces a Fieldwork Session Planner, which he developed while working on his PhD. Kristian’s ELAR Collection is titled An audio-visual documentation of Chamalal, a language of Dagestan (Russia). By Kristian Roncero Fieldwork is messy, otherwise “armchair linguists” wouldn’t call us “dirty feet linguists”. However, we should think of ways of finding a bit of order in the midst of the chaos. In
This week on the ELAR blog, ELPD grantee Agnes Conrad tells us about her project ‘Grammar of Minyag, a minority language of Western Sichuan‘. Can you give us some background on the language ecology in your area? Minyag (mvm) is an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken by somewhere around 10,000 people living in the vicinity of Mt. Gongga, Sichuan, China. Almost all speakers are at least bilingual (Mandarin and Minyag), and
This week on the ELAR blog, SOAS graduate Rebekah Hayes tells us about her experience using an ELAR collection for her MA dissertation. Rebekah completed her MA in Language Documentation and Description at SOAS in 2019, and is now a Research Fellow on the True Echos research project at the British Library. Why did you choose to work with an ELAR collection? I decided to work with an ELAR collection
This week on the ELAR blog, ELDP grantee Richard T. Griscom gives us some insights on his experiences conducting fieldwork remotely – something he also recently discussed on ELAR depositor Martha Tsutsui Billins’ podcast Fieldnotes. Richard’s ELAR collection ‘Documentation of Isimjeeg Datooga’ can be accessed here. By Richard T. Griscom The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a lot of uncertainty into our lives. For those working with endangered language communities the travel
Today on the ELAR blog, we are featuring ELDP grantee Danielle Barth’s project ‘Matukar Panau‘. Matukar Panau is a highly endangered Oceanic language spoken near Madang, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Although most children are no longer learning Matukar Panau, current speakers (approx. 300) form a vibrant community of multilingual speakers in dense social networks. As an Oceanic language on the PNG coast, Matukar Panau has many interesting Papuan features. Danielle’s ELAR