25.1137, Welcome Our Next Featured Linguist for 2014 Matthias Brenzinger

Thu Mar 6 19:09:48 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-1137. Thu Mar 06 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.1137, Welcome Our Next Featured Linguist for 2014 Matthias Brenzinger

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Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 14:09:14
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: TraveLING Along with Featured Linguist Matthias Brenzinger

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Matthias Brenzinger from the University of Cape Town is another Featured
Linguist from the region of Sub-Saharan Africa where we are traveLING with our
Fund Drive this week. Find below Matthias’ story about his way to linguistics.

How I Became a Linguist by Matthias Brenzinger

It was about one and a half years ago that I finally I arrived where I had
always wanted to be and do what I had always wanted - teach students, support
small language communities and conduct research on African languages on my
doorstep. The University of Cape Town and my new colleagues welcomed my
efforts to establish the Centre for African Language Diversity – CALDi as well
as The African Language Archive – TALA and I was recently appointed the Mellon
Research Chair: African Language Diversity this initiative. The main aim of
CALDi is to train young African scholars in descriptive linguistics and open
up space for research into African languages at UCT with the hopes of
countering the dominance of African linguistics outside the continent. It has
been a great challenge for which my whole career has been a form of
preparation.

I was born (1957) in Baiertal a small village squeezed into a narrow valley
between the Black Forest and the Odenwald mountain range, not far from
Heidelberg (Germany), and I I felt alien there as far back as I can remember.
I grew up with an urge to escape and when a Catholic priest came to our small
school and showed slides from Portugal, I knew I had to go there. I had,
however, misunderstood and thought the pictures where from somewhere in
Africa. At the age of 11, I was sent to a Catholic boarding school a long way
from home where I was taught by retired, often frustrated missionaries. From
then on, I rarely went back to visit my home village. After about four years I
was discharged from the mission school, most likely because I was not Catholic
enough. For several years I lived in the servants’ chamber of a farm above the
pigs stable, but somehow I still managed to attend and also complete high
school. After that I travelled extensively in Asia and Africa and it was on
these trips that I developed a serious interest in languages, driven by the
desire to understand the thoughts of the people I encountered from all these
different cultures.

In 1980, while passing through Tanzania on my way to Zambia, I had my first
encounter with an Africanist when I met Herman Batibo, who taught African
linguistics at the University of Dar Es Salaam. On my return to Germany I went
straight to the University of Cologne where Bernd Heine welcomed me to his
Institute of African Language Studies. The institute soon became the centre of
my world and remained so for 28 years. No other person has had a greater
impact on my life - we became friends from the first day we met and our close
friendship continues to this day. Bernd is a linguist 24/7, needs very little
sleep and is highly efficient in what he does. Above all he is brilliant
thinker and all this results in his enormous research output with regard to
quality and quantity; but what I admire most about him is his generosity in
sharing his vast knowledge with everyone without discrimination on any
grounds.

Right from the beginning of my own research into African languages, I focused
on languages spoken by marginalized communities in remote areas. I enjoy being
in remote places in mountain regions, in semi-desert regions or in the deep
bush. I have often spent many months in settlements without electricity and
limited water supply.

My first fieldtrip took me to the Marakwet in the Cherangany hills of Kenya
followed by several trips to visit speakers of Ma’a-Mbugu in the Usambara
Mountains of Tanzania. Fieldwork near Mount Kenya on Mukogodo Maasai and Yaaku
came next. Honey and bees are to these former hunter-gatherers what milk and
cattle are for pastoralists: precious commodities and extremely important in
their daily lives and thinking. For that reason, the special vocabularies for
traditional beekeeping and honey hunting were my main interests for several
years. Together with Mukogodo hunters, I followed honey guides, small birds
that are known throughout the African continent for leading humans and honey
badgers to wild bee nests. After harvesting the honey, the birds expect their
share as reward for their service. For linguists it is important to
participate in such important cultural activities, in order to be able to
understand stories, technical terms and most importantly, to get an idea of
the specific concepts that are underlying the languages they study.

In the early 1990s, while I was teaching at the University of Addis Ababa, I
conducted fieldwork in Southern Ethiopia and collected language data on
several little-known languages. Bayso and Harro are both spoken by small
communities on the Giddicho Island in Lake Abaya. When the new transitional
government of Ethiopia approved its new liberal language policy in 1993, I was
more than happy to support the implementation of mother-tongue education. As a
language consultant I visited hundreds of schools all over Southern Ethiopia
and collected information on the distribution and use of languages use as well
as speaker attitudes towards those languages. I interviewed teachers, students
and parents, and it has been great to see that my research findings have had a
direct impact on the languages used in some schools. This is very rare in the
kind of studies we are usually involved in.

A year later a new phase in my research career opened up when I began working
on  the Khoeid, !Xun and !Gui-Taa, language families, most commonly referred
to as the Khoisan languages of Southern Africa. I spent many months with Khwe
and //Ani in Namibia and Botswana and analysed and described various aspects
of their language. Together with the community, I developed a practical
orthography for Khwe-//Ani, which then became a written language on 15th
September 1996.  Since then I have contributed to community publications on
and in the Khwe-//Ani language. In my view, supporting community efforts to
develop their language is an important duty for linguists today. The most
difficult aspect in long-term fieldwork for me is to deal with all the friends
and language consultants who are dying at a young age. Members of marginalized
communities on the African continent generally have much shorter life
expectancies than the national averages. Poverty and hazardous environments
result in malnutrition and high rates of tropical diseases, as well as AIDS.

I had already observed on my first field trip that young members of many of
the small language communities no longer acquired the ethnic languages of
previous generations. I found that unlike language shift in most other parts
of the world, English was no threat to small African languages, at least at
that time. African languages were instead replacing other African languages.
As a result, I became involved in UNESCO initiatives on Endangered Languages
and supported the establishment of the Endangered Language Section in UNESCO’s
Intangible Cultural Heritage Unit right from the beginning. In 1995 the Red
Book of Endangered Languages was launched at the University of Tokyo and a
year later, the very rough first edition of UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s
Languages in Danger of Disappearing was edited by the late Stephen Wurm. He
was instrumental in advancing UNESCO’s activities and I remember his frequent
phone calls from Australia to Germany, much to my wife’s consternation as they
came always in the middle of the night and went on for hours.

Christopher Moseley edited a significantly improved edition of the UNESCO
Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger in 2010 and invited me as the
regional expert for Africa. Since then, the online version has been constantly
revised and updated and I am responsible for the section on the African
continent south of the Sahara. In 2009, Lyle Campbell, Helen Aristar-Dry and
Anthony Aristar developed the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat)
project, which was launched in 2011 by the University of Hawaii, The Linguist
List and Google. The aim of ELCat is to provide detailed information on
endangered languages worldwide and Anna Belew from the Linguist List is doing
a great job in coordinating inputs from the regional directors, as which I
serve for the African continent. While the ELCat and UNESCO overviews on
language endangerment make no difference for the languages and their
situations, they do an important job in raising awareness and also assisting
in the development language documentation projects.

Another long-term professional commitment close to my heart concerns the World
Congress of African Linguistics – WOCAL, which is held every three years. I
consider WOCAL to be of eminent importance since it constitutes the only truly
international and pan-theoretical Congress of African Linguistics. By
organizing summer schools and special workshops at the WOCAL congresses for
young linguists, I have supported the participation of scholars from African
universities since its inception in 1993. For the last 10 years I have served
as General Secretary of WOCAL and ensuring a strong representation of African
scholars at the congresses is one of my main concerns.

Amongst all the linguists profiled on the Linguist List, one sees an absolute
commitment to the study of language and languages. Like them, I feel
particularly fortunate to have been able to forge a career in such a
fascinating field of study. Although I have spent a lot of time in the far
flung corners of the world studying languages and cultures most people have
never heard of, my career in linguistics has given me the opportunity to
fulfil my childhood dreams whilst bringing into sharp focus the very important
issues of language endangerment.

Matthias Brenzinger

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