Students Document a Disappearing Language (fwd)

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Students Document a Disappearing Language

By Kerry Grens
Durham, New Hampshire
25 May 2006
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In the highlands of southwest Kenya, about a million and a half people
speak an unwritten language called Kisii. Halfway around the world from
the coffee and maize farms of Kisii district, students at the University
of New Hampshire are developing a rulebook for the language. They have
only the help of one transplanted native speaker. And he's learning
just as much about Kisii as they are.

In a typical session, seven linguistics students gather around Henry
Gekonde and pepper him with questions. "Can you say that it's 'not red'
in Kisii?" asks one. "Yeah," he responds, "You can say yaya teri
mbariri. Yaya means no."

Gekonde grew up in Kenya, speaking Kisii at home. The students are
trying to learn as much as they can from him about his native tongue.
Over the past several months, they have developed a keen ear for a
language that none of them had ever heard before. They transcribe
Gekonde's answers using the International Phonetic Alphabet, just about
as quickly as he speaks. Today, they are trying to understand how to say
"not" in Kisii.

Aside from a translation of the Bible and a few children's books, the
class has been unable to find anything written in Kisii.

[photo inset - The words banana, fish, hand and book are from some of
the 8 noun classes the students discovered as they documented the Kisii
language]

The purpose of this linguistics course is to teach students how to
document a largely unknown language. And with the semester coming to a
close, the students have made considerable progress. They started with
simply collecting the sounds Kisii uses, and translating vocabulary.
Now they've got the basic sentence structure down. It is the same as
English: subject, verb, direct object.

But Adam Jardine says he and his classmates have also uncovered some
bewildering differences. "It's kind of like in French and Spanish where
there's a masculine/feminine distinction. In Kisii, there (are) 8 of
those distinctions. So depending on what type of noun a word is, all
these different things in the sentence change."

Another difference is that Kisii does not have the verb "to be". It
does, however, have many different past tenses.

All of these complexities were also somewhat of a surprise to Henry
Gekonde, who admits he didn't really analyze his language until now.
"Even the way it works -- the tenses, the noun system and all that -- I
never thought about that. I'm uncovering things about Kisii that I
didn't know before. And for some of the questions that the students ask
me, I don't really have an answer." He says it's very exciting. "We're
figuring it out together."

Gekonde never learned about Kisii grammar. Kenyan schools teach only the
country's dominant languages, Swahili and English. "It's a dying
language anyway, not that many people speak it," he says, adding, "it's
not used in academic research or work or writing, so what's the point of
studying it?"

To preserve it, according to linguistics professor Naomi Nagy, who
teaches this class. There are very few texts that describe anything of
Kisii grammar, she says, adding that even though Kisii is not included
on the endangered list, hundreds of unwritten languages are at risk of
going extinct within the next hundred years. "I think that a really
important step for people who are trying to preserve endangered
languages is to get the speakers of those languages to realize that
their language is just as good."

[photo inset - New Hampshire linguist Naomi Nagy and Henry Gekonde grill
a goat at a Kenyan dinner to mark the end of the semester]

So Professor Nagy asked Henry Gekonde to be the subject of her language
documentation class. He says he was happy to do it. He sees Kisii
eroding among the younger generation in Kenya, and being replaced by
English. Gekonde's hope is that documenting Kisii will help keep his
native language alive
 and with it, the Kisii way of interpreting the
world. "You have computers and cars and things like that. That makes
you view the world in a different way," he explains. "We have bananas
and maize and walks to the market on foot, lots of rain, and we have
words that describe that lifestyle that people lead, and that's the way
we view the world. That's really what distinguishes us from people who
speak other languages."

Henry Gekonde says he's determined to preserve those distinctions.
Although he came to the University of New Hampshire as a linguistics
graduate student to study English, he now plans to return to Kenya to
develop the first Kisii dictionary.