Living with water scarcity. A tale from Africa

Sophie Salffner has spent six months in Nigeria doing linguistic fieldwork. She never lived a day without water, but learnt how to manage it in a different way. In this short article, Sophie describes her experience in the world of water scarcity, far away from home and far away from the luxurious daily showers and running tap water of her home country Germany

Power solutions in the field: Solar power for laptop computers

The task of language documentation is increasingly tied to computers, for processing both text and audio. Working in the field can create problems that many of us do not experience in our home countries. Many language communities live in remote locations where mains electricity is non-existent or unreliable. One solution to this problem involves using solar panels to capture electricity, and a car battery to store it. This paper summarises the authors' experiences with powering laptops using solar panels and car batteries during our recent fieldtrips to Nigeria

Children documenting language and culture: Games and toys in Ikakumo

We have all played some form of football at some point in our lives, but what is your favourite game and what toys did you use to play with? Do you know the games ames, lago, ayo, ekpe, okuto, cashew, locker, abas, ludo, tyre, ring or whot? Have you ever raced a bamboo car down the road? In this exhibition, you see photos of games and toys taken by children in Ikakumo and videos of parents reminiscing about the games they used to play when they were small. You also see photos of the village where the children live and of the animals that people keep, photos of how the children help at home, and photos of what goes on in the village. You can also find out how such photos and videos shot by the children help linguists with documenting a language and a culture, and how a linguist might put an exhibition and the materials to go with it into an archive

Tense, aspect and manner encoding in Ikaan beyond verbal inflection

This paper reports on aspects of the verbal morphology of Ikaan, an endangered minority language spoken in Nigeria. In addition to regular and obligatory tense-aspect-mood inflection, Ikaan shows a range of optional morphemes in the verb which translate with adverbial meanings such as ‘just’, ‘still’, ‘again’ or ‘too’ but do not fit the category of adverbs in the language. These morphemes trigger a range of changes in the verbal affixes and the verbal root, both at the segmental and the tonal level. Neither the inflectional nor the semantic side of the tense-aspect-mood system has been described yet, and nothing has previously been written about the meaning, classification and effects of the additional adverb-like morphemes. While this paper cannot give an exhaustive description and analysis of these morphemes, it provides an overview and some preliminary hypotheses about these morphemes

Tone in the phonology, lexicon and grammar of Ikaan

This thesis investigates the forms, functions and behaviour of tone in the phonology,lexicon, morphosyntax and the phonology-grammar interfaces in Ikaan (Benue-Congo, Nigeria). The analysis is based on an annotated audio corpus of recordings from 29 speakers collected during ten months of fieldwork complemented with participant observation and informally collected data. The study demonstrates that tone operates at a wide range of levels of linguistic analysis in Ikaan. As phonemes, tones distinguish meaning in minimal pairs and are subject to phonological rules. As morphemes, tones and tonal melodies bear meaning in inflection, derivation and reduplication. In the syntax, tones mark phrase boundaries. At the phonology-semantics interface, constructionspecific constraints on the tonal representation distinguish between predicating and referential nominal modifiers. Combined with intonation and voicing, tones distinguish between statements and morphosyntactically identical yes/no questions. The research identifies a range of unusual tonal behaviours in Ikaan. The two tones H and L follow markedly different phonologies. In the association of lexical and grammatical tonal melodies, H must be realised whereas non-associated L are deleted. Formerly associated but de-linked L however are not deleted but remain floating. The OCP is found to apply to L but not to H. H is downstepped after floating L but not after overt L. In addition, three different locations of downstep are attested which correlate with different syntactic and semantic properties of the respective constructions. In two of these downstep locations, a leftward copying process occurs in addition to a generally applicable rightward copying process so that two directions of copying occur. The thesis concludes by discussing the implications of the Ikaan findings for the wider theoretical discourse with respect to the status of the OCP, the directionality of spreading and the modelling of downstep

A Guide to the Ikaan Language and Culture Documentation

Language documentation collections contain valuable and unique resources on the languages and cultures of the people represented in the collection. To allow users to understand and use one particular collection, this article provides a guide to the language documentation project “Farming, food and yam: language and cultural practices among Ikaan speakers,” deposited in the Endangered Languages Archive. It gives a bird’s eye view of the collection, showing the project background, the conventions and workflows, and the structure and content of the resources. In addition, it provides a glimpse behind the scene, outlining motivations, observations, thoughts on the collection, and future plans. This article thus contextualizes the collection by placing it in its wider research and community context

Tone in the phonology, lexicon and grammar of Ikaan.

This thesis investigates the forms, functions and behaviour of tone in the phonology, lexicon, morphosyntax and the phonology-grammar interfaces in Ikaan (Benue-Congo, Nigeria). The analysis is based on an annotated audio corpus of recordings from 29 speakers collected during ten months of fieldwork complemented with participant observation and informally collected data. The study demonstrates that tone operates at a wide range of levels of linguistic analysis in Ikaan. As phonemes, tones distinguish meaning in minimal pairs and are subject to phonological rules. As morphemes, tones and tonal melodies bear meaning in inflection, derivation and reduplication. In the syntax, tones mark phrase boundaries. At the phonology-semantics interface, construction- specific constraints on the tonal representation distinguish between predicating and referential nominal modifiers. Combined with intonation and voicing, tones distinguish between statements and morphosyntactically identical yes/no questions. The research identifies a range of unusual tonal behaviours in Ikaan. The two tones H and L follow markedly different phonologies. In the association of lexical and grammatical tonal melodies, H must be realised whereas non-associated L are deleted. Formerly associated but de-linked L however are not deleted but remain floating. The OCP is found to apply to L but not to H. H is downstepped after floating L but not after overt L. In addition, three different locations of downstep are attested which correlate with different syntactic and semantic properties of the respective constructions. In two of these downstep locations, a leftward copying process occurs in addition to a generally applicable rightward copying process so that two directions of copying occur. The thesis concludes by discussing the implications of the Ikaan findings for the wider theoretical discourse with respect to the status of the OCP, the directionality of spreading and the modelling of downstep

Farming, food and yam: language and cultural practices among Ikaan speakers: an archive of language and cultural material from the Akaan people of Ikakumo (Ondo State and Edo State, Nigeria)

This corpus contains linguistic and cultural data on Ikaan, a dialect of Ukaan, which is spoken in two villages in south-western Nigeria. This research project behind the corpus investigates phonetic and phonological variation among speakers based on a documentation of language around, knowledge of and practices in food, food production and farming, with a special focus on the New Yam Festival. The data was collected by Sophie Salffner, linguist and principal investigator of the project, Maria Tzika, visual anthropologist of the project, and the community members themselves. Outputs of the project include an annotated audiovisual documentation corpus with data from a wide range of speakers, but also an anthropological visual map and a series of short documentary films around the festival