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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Skype talk on an NLP project on the Zaar and Hausa languages

Joseph Lovestrand has sent us the following message:

The Chadic Languages & Cultures group, run by Cameroonian linguists, is meeting online again this Saturday April 24, 9 AM, Cameroon time (GMT+1). All are welcome to join the discussion (in French and English)!

Chadic Languages & Cultures
Saturday, April 24, 2021
9-10 am (Cameroon time, GMT+1)
Join via Skype: https://join.skype.com/YTdz8ale1BIF

Bernard Caron will present his upcoming work on treebanks and automated descriptive grammars for an NLP project (CNRS) on the Zaar and Hausa languages.

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.

New Publication: Topics in Chadic Linguistics X

Topics in Chadic Linguistics X – Papers from the 9th Biennial International Colloquium on the Chadic Languages, Villejuif, September 7-8, 2017, edited by Henry Tourneux and Yvonne Treis, has just appeared at Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.

The following papers are contained:

Paul Newman:
Russell G. Schuh – An overview of his Chadic scholarship

Umma Aliyu Musa / Esther Morgenthal / Henning Schreiber:
Less commonly documented literacy practices – Secular Hausa Ajami as situated social literacy

Sergio Baldi / Rudolf Leger:
Animal names in Hausa and Kupto – Their specific characteristics mirrored in proverbs, epithets and sayings

Gian Claudio Batic:
Verb classes and TAM system in Kushi (Nigeria)

Roger Blench:
Current research on the A3 West Chadic languages

Philippe Cassuto / Victor Porkhomovsky:
Les stratégies de traduction de l’Ancien Testament dans les trois versions haoussa de la Bible – Un problème d’interprétation ?

Emma Kuipers:
Verb classification in Mogum (Eastern Chadic)

Joseph Lovestrand:
Ideophones in Barayin

Joseph McIntyre:
Patterns of organisation in the Hausa grade system

Nina Pawlak / Joseph McIntyre:
Semantic and pragmatic motivations of gender assignment in Hausa

James Roberts / Albert Camus Soulokadi:
On ideophones in Musey

Olga Stolbova:
Lexical links between Chadic, Cushitic and Omotic languages

Henry Tourneux:
Le syntagme nominal dans le parler « kotoko » de Kousseri

Melanie Viljoen:
Gavar verb morphology

Report on the First West Chadic Language Workshop

Report on the First West Chadic Language Workshop, held in Jos, 20-21^st April, 2012

 Roger Blench

A workshop was held in Jos, 20-21^st April, 2012, to bring together speakers of West Chadic languages, especially those concerned with either developed or potential orthographies. In practice, most of the languages represented were A3 languages. Speakers of the following languages attended;

• Ngas
• Mwaghavul
• Mupun
• Takas
• Chakfem
• Mushere
• Goemai
• Ywom
• Geji

As well as a survey team from Language Development Facilitators, staff of TCNN and a deputation from the Department of Linguistics, Nassarawa State University were also in attendance. More details of the programme are on the attached pdf. The workshop was used as an opportunity to record basic sociolinguistic and lexical data for lesser-known languages, including Ywom, Takas, Mushere and Cakfem. Video interviews with speakers were also recorded to introduce the languages and to make a plea for outside assistance with language development. These will be posted on Roger Blench’s YouTube page shortly.