Endangered Language Recordings for NPR Science Friday

This page contains some field recordings from Africa, aired on the Science Friday program on 8 March 2002.

Useful pointers: Ethnologue | Endangered Language Fund | Indigenous Language Institute

Good books: Vanishing Voices (Nettle & Romaine); Language Death (Crystal); Green Book of Language Revitalization (Hinton & Hale).

Dschang (Cameroon)

One of the most complex tone languages ever studied, which has defied full analysis despite 30 years of scholarship. Data collected by Steven Bird.

• three short phrases (5sec): past, present and future tense for the sentence "the chief buried the dogs" - here the different tones are responsible for communicating the tense.

Here are the transcriptions with links to the individual sound files. Click on the IPA transcription to hear the audio, and the tone transcription to hear the larynx recording (made with a laryngograph).

a. the chief buried dogs (immediate past) b. the chief buries dogs (simple present) c. the chief will bury dogs (immediate future)

This language has no fewer than five past tenses and five future tenses.

For more information about this language and Steven Bird's fieldwork in Cameroon, please see http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sb/fieldwork/.

Ega (Ivory Coast)

An undocumented and critically endangered language spoken by 300 people in Ivory Coast, West Africa, collected by Dafydd Gibbon.

• Tale (30sec): Close part harmony response singing, taken from an Ega tale about an unfaithful wife whose misbehaviour was observed by a bird who sings about what he sees in this song. "MUwa:" and "sEsE" are discourse particles, effectively meaning "Narrator: Thus it was. Responder: Incredible!"

For more information about this language and Dafydd Gibbon's fieldwork in Ivory Coast, please see http://coral.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/LangDoc/EGA/.