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In:Language Documentation and Endangerment in Africa
Edited by James Essegbey, Brent Henderson and Fiona Mc Laughlin
[Culture and Language Use 17] 2015
► pp. 277–312

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Describing endangered languages

Experiences from a PhD grammar project in Africa

Published online: 22 October 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.17.12sei
The present contribution deals with documenting underdocumented and endangered languages in Africa. It focuses on the documentation of languages through PhD programs as most grammatical descriptions produced today stem from PhD theses. The focus lies on facets of the organization and conception of a PhD grammar project on the endangered Bantu language Yeyi. This project resulted in a published grammatical description in about 4 years. The article describes important aspects of the research program as they relate to the development of the grammatical description as well as the writing process of the grammatical description itself. In doing so the relationship between the creation of a comprehensive grammatical description and prior preparation for the fieldwork, e.g. survey work, developing cultural expertise, the team environment both in the field and at home, are elaborated against a backdrop of stateof- the-art theorizations about descriptive grammars. I situate the work on the Yeyi grammar in the context of the newly emerging documentary-linguistics discipline, and provide some suggestions for how PhD documentation projects should be carried out in the 21st century.
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