Join Pius Akumbu, a Cameroonian linguist and Director of Research in African Linguistics at CNRS, as he dives into the rich nuances of Babanki. He shares his innovative approach to linguistic fieldwork, including staging a mock wedding to document endangered language rituals, which surprisingly inspired real ceremonies. Pius discusses the complexities of Babanki's tone system, explaining how high and low tones can entirely change meanings. He also recounts his challenges and triumphs in founding a local school, ensuring children can learn in their mother tongue even amidst conflict.
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Combine Intuition With Community Data
When documenting your own language, combine native intuition with data from multiple community speakers.
Rely on community variation and recorded data rather than solely on personal judgment.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Ritual Registers Require Insider Access
Some ritual registers, like songs in childbirth or death ceremonies, contain meanings that even native speakers find hard to access.
Akumbu notes that understanding these requires building trust and close work with the specific ritual participants.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Staging A Mock Wedding To Record Ritual Speech
Pius Akumbu staged a mock traditional Babanki wedding to record ceremonial language when no natural event occurred.
The enactment reconnected people to tradition and inspired at least one real traditional wedding afterward.
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Linguistic research has its highs and lows: from staging a traditional wedding to learn about ceremonial words to having your efforts to found a village school disrupted by civil war. Linguistic research can also be about highs and lows: in this case, looking at how high and low tones in Babanki words affect their meaning.
In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about the highs and lows of fieldwork in Babanki with Dr. Pius Akumbu, who's a linguist from Babanki, Cameroon, and a Director of Research in African Linguistics at CNRS in the LLACAN Lab (the Languages and Cultures of Africa Lab) in Paris, France. We talk about Professor Akumbu's documentation work on a wide variety of topics from the relationship of Babanki to other Grassfields and Bantu languages, what happens when words have a mysterious extra tone that is only produced under the right circumstances (floating tones), to that time he staged a false wedding to document traditional wedding ceremonial language – and led to a real couple opting for a traditional-style wedding of their own. We also talk about the process of founding a school in his home village to ensure that children have access to primary education in their own language.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice: https://pod.link/1186056137/episode/dGFnOnNvdW5kY2xvdWQsMjAxMDp0cmFja3MvMjE3Mjk5MTM2Mg
Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/795823209951936512/transcript-episode-108
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