Linguist Explains Why He Documents Disappearing Bantu Languages (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Wednesday, January 23, 2008
News Release

Linguist Explains Why He Documents Disappearing Bantu Languages
He calls them a rich source of information about our own potential and our

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Much research addresses how and why many of the earth's
thousands of languages are disappearing.

The question still arises, however, as to why it should matter to the rest of us
if, say, Pite Sami, a language spoken by fewer than 20 inhabitants of Norway and
Sweden, should vanish from the face of the Earth.

Jeff Good, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics in the
University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, says that we should attend
to these losses because even seldom-used languages can tell us a great deal
about the methods of categorization of the natural and mental world and because
they can serve as vital links between the present and the prehistoric past.

Good is the recipient of a recent grant and a fellowship from the National
Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities' Documenting
Endangered Languages Program, a new, multi-year effort to preserve records of
key languages before they become extinct.

He says, "As the numbers of languages decline, we lose rich and distinct
cultural variations from which we can learn a great deal in fields as far
ranging as anthropology, agriculture, linguistics, philosophy, geography and
prehistory."

His current research involves six languages spoken in a cluster of villages in
the northwest highlands of Cameroon, a country in which more than 200 different
languages are spoken, from Aghem to Zulgo.

Good says that from a scientific standpoint, the work of linguists today is like
that of early botanical and zoological explorers and collectors who went into
the field to document the diversity of living things in the world, with no idea
of what they might find.

"Of course there is a human dimension to linguistics study," he says, "since
linguists also work to preserve for the speakers themselves, their descendants
and posterity information about cultures that find themselves marginalized by
the modern world.

Good says, "Although in principle, cultural knowledge can be transmitted apart
from language -- as the Irish, for instance, can attest -- in practice, the
political and economic forces that cause people to give up their languages also
cause them to lose cultural knowledge," he says.

He notes that very often, the last speakers also are among the last who remember
traditional stories, songs and histories.

"The languages of concern to me," he says, "are in the Bantu language family,
which itself includes 500 or 600 distinct languages. The languages I study
remain alive in part because the hilly terrain of this area seems to foster
language variety and isolates the region commercially and politically.

"In fact, people living in one village may speak an entirely different language
than that spoken in the next village," Good says, noting that people in such
circumstances are multilingual by necessity. In addition to speaking their own
languages and those of nearby villages, many also speak the official languages
of Cameroon, which are English and French.

"When these villagers move to a new place," he says, "they add new languages to
their repertoire, rather than replacing one language with another. Even in
large cities they maintain their native languages by attending regular 'country
meetings' with their fellow villagers."

Social groups like 'country meetings' are important, Good says, because as the
speakers of a minor language disappear or die, those who are left are often
absorbed -- along with the special aspects of their culture -- into larger
social and language groups.

This is less likely to occur, he says, if speakers of a minority language (even
those fluent in the lingua franca) are able to retain the use of their original
tongue, if not in all spheres of life, at least within the home.

The NEH grants will fund Good's documentary and descriptive work on two groups
of under-described languages, the endangered Western Beboid languages and the
moribund languages of the Furu Awa subdivision and will produce the first
comprehensive descriptive materials on the grammar and lexicon of these
languages.

Although much work in the classification of the 500-plus Bantu languages
(including Swahili and Zulu) spoken throughout southern Africa remains to be
done, Good says it is generally believed that the ancestors of the 240 million
modern-day Bantu language speakers migrated in prehistoric times from the
borderland area in Cameroon where he works.

When his study is complete, Good will have produced primary documentation
resources of the endangered languages studied and descriptive materials on the
languages in the form of annotated recordings and initial descriptions of the
languages' grammars.

He also will construct a comparative database of grammatical information on
Western Beboid and closely related languages and produce recommendations for
tool design for field linguistics, including structured annotations of
grammatical data containing links to linguistic ontologies.

Good has conducted fieldwork on other African languages and worked on the
Comparative Bantu Online Dictionary and a lexical database for the Turkish
Electronic Living Lexicon project.

He also is technical director of the Rosetta Project, for which he oversees the
development of standards and tool for accessioning data into the Rosetta data
management system.

Good has published a score of articles in linguistic journals, with three
additional articles forthcoming and two under review. Also forthcoming from
Oxford University Press is his edited volume, "Linguistic Universals and
Language Change."

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, the
largest and most comprehensive campus in the State University of New York. UB's
more than 28,000 students pursue their academic interests through more than 300
undergraduate, graduate and professional degree programs. Founded in 1846, the
University at Buffalo is a member of the Association of American Universities.