New Paper on South Bauchi languages

Roger Blench has uploaded a new paper titled “The South Bauchi languages: Nigeria’s largest group of (almost) unknown languages” on Academia.edu.

The South Bauchi languages are West Chadic languages spoken around Bauchi town. Although there are some forty languages, few have been studied by linguists and even fewer have any language development. The best-known languages are Zaar, Boghom, Geri and Zul. The talk reviews what is known and presents the results of fresh fieldwork undertaken in 2019. We found that some languages are down to the last few speakers and urgent research is required to document these languages before they disappear. South Bauchi languages are known for their complex phonologies, and as a consequence, there are many problems in developing effective writing systems. The presentation offers some suggestions for the priority research agenda.

Read the paper at Academia.edu

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Presenting Chadic research online on Zenodo & Academia

Zenodo.org is an open-access repository that allows researchers to deposit research papers, data sets, research software, reports, and any other research related digital artifacts. For each submission, a digital object identifier (DOI) is created, which makes the stored items easily citeable. Find out more about Zenodo here.

Our colleague Roger Blench has uploaded a paper he presented at the Conference on African Languages and Linguistics a couple of months ago and it is now available for download or watching on Zenodo: The South Bauchi languages of Central Nigeria: a fresh overview based on recent fieldwork

Our colleague Joseph Lovestrand has uploaded a talk on “Manner demonstratives in Barayin (East Chadic)” he presented at the Dallas International Academic Lens (DIAL) conference, which is also available for download or watching on Zenodo.

Roger Blench has also uploaded many of his conference presentations, papers maps, wordlists, reports and even whole books on Academia.edu, e.g.

• • An introduction to Mantsi, a South Bauchi language of Central Nigeria
  • An introduction to Zul
  • A DICTIONARY OF TAL, A WEST CHADIC LANGUAGE OF NIGERIA
  • Warji Dictionary
  • Belnәng, an undocumented Chadic language of Central Nigeria
  • Nteng, an undocumented Chadic language of Central Nigeria
  • Index of Nigerian languages

More by Roger Blench on Aacademia.edu

Online repositories like Zenodo and Academia will probably become more popular. Please let the rest of us know whenever you publish something related to Chadic on these platforms so we can keep track of what is going on in Chadic Studies.

New Paper on South Bauchi Group

Our colleague Roger Blench has uploaded a new paper (“The South Bauchi languages of Central Nigeria: a fresh view based on recent fieldwork”) on Academia.edu that presents some new findings on the South Bauchi group of West Chadic languages:

The South Bauchi languages are a major subgroup of West Chadic B. They are spoken around Bauchi town in Bauchi State, Nigeria. The existence of some is reported in this paper for the first time. There are thought to be some 38 of which 4 are extinct and several, such as Lukshi down to the last few speakers. The paper presents basic background on this group and prospects for upcoming survey work. Some basic grammatical characteristics of South Bauchi are outlined.

You can read and download the paper at Academia.edu.