Linguist's goal: to save endangered tongue (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Posted on Mon, May. 09, 2005

Linguist's goal: to save endangered tongue
Grant lets grad student study Badiaranke language

By CHARLES BURRESS
San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/montereyherald/news/11601197.htm

It's a wish come true for a University of California at Berkeley grad
student with a rare taste in wishes.

A special grant will allow Rebecca Cover to dodge malarial mosquitoes
and live in a mud hut without electricity in a hot, humid and remote
corner of Africa where, as the only white face in the village, she will
attempt to communicate in a difficult language that most of the world
has never heard of.

''It's very exciting, of course,'' said Cover, 26, a doctoral student in
linguistics.

Cover's project is the only winner in Northern California among 39
grants and fellowships in new a federal program for threatened
languages.

''This is a rescue mission to save endangered languages,'' National
Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Bruce Cole said a joint statement
by the NEH and the National Science Foundation. The agencies cited
experts saying that more than 3,000 of the 6,000 to 7,000 languages now
in use are approaching extinction.

The agencies awarded $4.4 million in their new Documenting Endangered
Languages partnership.

Cover's $17,767 grant will record and analyze Badiaranke, an unwritten
tongue spoken by an estimated 12,000 people where three countries meet
-- Senegal, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau.

Although tiny in the number of users, Badiaranke belongs to the world's
largest family of languages, Niger-Congo, which consists of between
1,200 and 1,500 different tongues, said UC linguistics Professor Larry
Hyman, sponsor of Cover's proposal.

''We're very, very pleased,'' Hyman said. ''A huge number of people
applied.''

''She (Cover) is very distinguished,'' he said, adding that she had come
into linguistics after receiving her undergraduate degree in
astrophysics at Williams College, where she was a valedictorian. Two of
her letters of recommendation ''said she was their best student in 30
years,'' Hyman said.

Cover said she had embarked on linguistics because of a desire to work
with endangered languages, an interest that began when she served two
years in the Peace Corps as a health education volunteer in Senegal.

''When you lose a language,'' she said in a telephone interview Thursday
from her family home in Sharon, Mass., ''you're not just losing the
language, which in itself has great value from a scientific, linguistic
perspective, but from a cultural perspective as well.

''A lot of the culture is embedded in the language. When a language
dies, part of the culture dies, too.''

Cover got a foretaste of her project last year when she spent nearly two
months in the 487-person, Badiaranke-speaking village of Paroumba in
Senegal.