DOBES Archive
The Aché Documentation Project (ADOP) documents the language, practices, and cultural knowledge of the indigenous Aché groups of eastern Paraguay. This project focuses on the traditional language of the communities in all its varieties. Data include audio and video recordings of mythology, life history narratives, cultural practices, and traditional songs. Recordings are annotated in ELAN and Toolbox-files. A second project—the Aché Language Studies Project (ALSP)—investigates language contact in history and as the result of present-day cultural contact and change. The coordinators of both projects are Jost Gippert and Sebastian Drude. Research is being conducted by Eva-Maria Roessler, Jan...
The Akie of Tanzania are a traditional hunter-gatherer society whose language is seriously endangered. The language, presumably a member of the Kalenjin branch of the Southern Nilotic languages, is still actively spoken in three villages of northeastern Tanzania, but the majority language and culture in the Akie-speaking area is Maa (speaking the Maasai dialect), which belongs to the Eastern Nilotic branch of the Nilotic family. The total number of Akie people is estimated at roughly 2500 people, but the number of people still speaking the language is presumably below 200. The massive impact of Maa language, culture, and life style plus the increasing influence of Bantu languages, including...
The main objective of the Awetí Language Documentation Project is the comprehensive documentation of the language spoken by the Awetí, an indigenous tribe of just over a hundred people living in the Xingú headwater area of central Brazil. This comprehensive multimedia corpus is suitable as a basis for further research on the language and culture of the Awetí even if and when the language and culture become extinct. The Awetí Project closely co-operated with two other DOBES projects on languages in the area (Trumai and Kuikuro / Upper Xinguan Karib): all these languages are genetically unrelated. Co-operation was to ensure, among other things, the creation of analogous corpora for the three...
Summary of deposit This corpus constitutes a rich and diverse multimedia collection of Gyeli/Kola language use, centering around culturally relevant activities of Central African “Pygmy” forest foragers in Cameroon. It includes a wide variety of text genres, such as natural conversations, procedural texts, folk narratives, interviews, music and dance, and elicitation and experimental data. The collection encompasses video and audio recordings of diverse topics and everyday situations of language use, for instance hunting, building traps and traditional huts in the rain forest, collecting wild honey, skinning and preparing hunted animals, making musical instruments, traditional music and...
The Baïnounk languages are a cluster of endangered language spoken in the Casamance area of Senegal (West Africa). Today, three main varieties of Baïnounk are spoken in Senegal and the neighbouring country Guinea Bissau. The label Baïnounk reunites people speaking these languages, people who feel that part of their cultural identity is Baïnounk, and a group of people (speaking Kobiana/Kasanga) who have privileged relationships with Baïnounk-speaking groups. The languages are closely related, but they have many differences in basic vocabulary and grammatical structure, and speakers of the different languages cannot understand each other’s Baïnounk variety.
The project documents the Baure language group with its three dialects: Baure, Carmelito, and Joaquiniano, spoken in the Bolivian Amazonia. Data were collected for a preceding project from 2003 till 2006 and incorporated to the archive. From 2007 till 2013 the current documentation project is collecting data. The archive contains audio and video data, historical written data, and current and historical images. The language data are annotated in Toolbox and/or Elan. Furthermore, the doctoral dissertation by Danielsen (2007) on the Baure grammar, the dissertation “Von Geistern, Steinen und anderen Leuten: Das Weltbild der Baure im boivianischen Tiefland” (Ghosts, stones, and other people: The...
The project has the urgent task to create and archive a repository of speech samples of various length and genres in Bayso and Haro, along grammatical sketches, dictionaries and sociolinguistic and anthropological profiles. The material is recorded in audio and video. The documentation activities are multidisciplinary and are based on the collaboration of linguists and anthropologists. All the team members collect, transcribe and translate the recorded speech with the collaboration of local consultants. Linguists are in charge of grammatical annotation and the creation of grammatical sketches, dictionaries and sociolinguistic profiles. The anthropologists add cultural information about the...
:: the language :: The Beaver language is an endangered First Nation language spoken in British Columbia and Alberta. It is still spoken in six different reserves by some 150 speakers; the youngest of those are in their thirties. Beaver is not acquired by children anymore and the vast majority of the adult speakers are bilingual in Beaver and English. It belongs to a Northern branch of the Athabaskan language family. The Athabaskan languages belong together with Tlingit and Eyak to a larger language family, the Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit family. The Athabaskan branch is divided into six subgroups: Southern Alaska, Central Alaska-Yukon, Northwestern Canada, Central British Columbia, Pacific...
The Bena Bena language (ISO 639-3 code: bef) is a Papuan language spoken in the Eastern Highlands province of Papua New Guinea. It belongs to the Gorokan family, and within this family is most closely related to Gahuku (Wurm 1975; Foley 1986; Ross 2005; Lewis 2009). The Gorokan family is in turn assigned to the large Trans-New Guinea Phylum (Ross 2005) as originally postulated by Wurm (1975). Despite a fair number of speakers (Lewis 2009 estimates 45,000) Bena Bena is endangered due to the increasing use of Tok Pisin, the main lingua franca of Papua New Guinea. Younger Bena speakers use Tok Pisin in daily conversations, and a considerable number of children are raised in Tok Pisin rather...
CELD - the Centre for Endangered Languages Documentation - was established in 2009 at Universitas Papua (UNIPA) in Manokwari (West Papua, Indonesia), in order to facilitate state of the art linguistic and anthropological research and reach out for communities of endangered languages in Indonesian Papua. Visit CELD’s homepage to read more about its history and about current activities http://www.celd-papua.net/. The CELD corpus currently contains data from seven languages spoken in the two Indonesian provinces Papua Barat and Papua. It comprises data collected and processed within the DoBeS documentation project “Documentation Summits in the Central Mountains of Papua” (Yali, Melayu Papua,...
This interdisciplinary project aims at the documentation of Cashinahua language and culture. The Cashinahua language community currently consists of about 6000 members living in several villages with 10 indigenous homelands in the Brazilian state of Acre, and about 1600 members living in 37 villages in Peru. Most members of the speech community are bilingual, either speaking Portuguese or Spanish as a second and in some cases (in Brazil) as a first language. The project is funded for the years of 2006 to 2009 by the VolkswagenStiftung in the Documentation of Endangered Languages Programme. The linguist Eliane Camargo initiated her research among the Brazilian Cashinahua in 1989 and...
The project is based on interdisciplinary and intercultural field research oriented towards documenting indigenous languages spoken in the Argentine Chaco region. The Chaco Project collects, processes, and archives linguistic and cultural data for Mocovi (Guaycuru), Tapiete (Tupi-Guarani), Vilela (Lule-Vilela) and Wichi (Mataco), with the objective of developing computarized and digitalized text, lexicographic, and ethnographic databases along with documentary videos. Documentation activities are carried out by a team comprised of linguistics, anthropogists, and media experts.
The CPDP has documented naturally occurring language (including child language) as well as more carefully planned varieties. The latter category includes folk tales, myths, historical and biographical narratives, staged conversations, songs, and as a special focus ritual texts of various types. All sessions have been audio- and video-recorded. Transcription has been done in Transcriber, translation to Nepali and English in ELAN, and glossing in Toolbox. Further annotations have been done partially in ELAN and partially in Toolbox.
The principal aims of the present project are the following: to contribute to the documentation of the language by audio-recording texts and providing them with transcription, translation and interlinear glossing; to give a detailed description of fundamental aspects of the linguistic structure of the language (on the basis of text material and elicitation lists); to collect a substantial list of vocabulary. We also train some Chipaya speakers so that they can elaborate a pedagogical grammar and a dictionary for use in the community. The data and analyses will also be a contribution towards a better comprehension of the interrelationship of the Andean languages among themselves and with...
The Lowland Chontal Documentation project began as a dissertation project at the University of California at Santa Barbara (1997-2001), continued at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (2002-2004), and was finished through a post-doctoral research grant funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (2004-2007). The goals of the dissertation research were (1) to investigate the formal, semantic, and discourse-functional profiles of predicates used to describe events of change of location, change of position, and change of state, and (2) to produce a grammatical sketch of the language in a descriptive and discourse-functional framework. The post-doctoral documentation project...
The project Language, Music and Place in Délįnę, Northwest Territories, Canada develops an interdisciplinary approach towards language documentation in a broad perspective. Délįnę is a community at a critical threshold in that language use and transmission has declined over the past twenty years, and the language could easily cease to be spoken in a short time. The community is currently under enormous pressures of social and environmental change that will soon lead to qualitatively different conditions for understanding the language. At this time, the language is heard in the community, and variability continues to exist in the language, based in part on the different places of origin...
The project, which has been founded by Volkswagen Foundation since 2002, focusses on three endangered Caucasian languages spoken in Georgia. Within the project, the three languages in question, viz. Batsbi (also named Tsova-Tush), Svan, and Udi, will be documented with audio-visual means to provide a basis for all kinds of investigations into their linguistic features.