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.
51:00
forum Ask episode
web_stories AI Snips
view_agenda Chapters
menu_book Books
auto_awesome Transcript
info_circle Episode notes
volunteer_activism ADVICE
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.
Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode
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
Announcements:
Lingthusiasm has more than twenty interview episodes, and you can find them all together on our Topics page, where we have a category for our interviews. We also have over 100 bonus episodes for patrons, with a few interviews there as well.
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the joys and challenges of translating internet slang with Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez, linguist and translator of Because Internet into Spanish! We talk about why Because Internet was the toughest and also most entertaining book he's ever translated (for some of the same reasons), from coming up with localized Spanish versions of vintage internet memes to making the silly names of pretend people in the example sentences just as silly in Spanish. We also talk about leaving breadcrumbs for future translators in the original text and the special challenge of translocalizing the title: Arroba Lengua isn't a literal translation of Because Internet, but it fits similarly into Spanish internet slang.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds. https://patreon.com/posts/137995510
For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/795082104011669504/lingthusiasm-episode-108-highs-and-lows-of-tone
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics 
