Expressiveness in Barayin

This weekend I’m presenting at a Workshop on the Typology of Ideophones. I’m using a collection of Barayin recordings to analyze when ideophones (and other words) are used with “expressive marking” or “expressiveness”. This is basically when people modify how a word is pronounced but the changes are not necessarily linked to a particular semantic

What is a Lexical-Functional approach to Barayin Morphosyntax?

Last month, I had a book published on a fairly niche topic: Barayin Morphosyntax: A Lexical-Functional Approach. In the words of Facebook friend Jon Laurion, “I had to look up the definition of most of the words in the definition of Barayin Morphosyntax.” I’m not sure the blurb on the book cover or website is

Associated motion and directionals in Chadic languages

I recently recorded a 20-minute presentation for a workshop on associated motion in African languages which is part of the 10th World Congress of African Linguistics (WOCAL 10), June 7-12, 2021. It’s free to register as a participant for the online conference and get full access to all the presentations through the WOCAL website. My

Language Ideology & Literacy in Barayin

Last year, I wrote a short blog about one of the recordings from the Barayin language documentation corpus I worked on in 2017. In that recording, Moussa Adou talks about the status of the language, and why literacy is important. There was another speech recorded that same day by another Barayin speaker who was actually

Language Documentation as a Scientific Enterprise

I’m leading the Introduction to Language Documentation & Description course for graduate students at SOAS this term. I recently gave a lecture on why creating a corpus of annotated texts is useful, or even essential, for describing the grammar of a (previously unstudied) language. Most of my own descriptive analysis has been about a language

Manner demonstratives in Barayin

I’m signed up as a proofreader with Language Science Press, so I regularly get emails about upcoming books, and I can volunteer to proofread any chapters that look interesting. A few months ago, I proofread a chapter on manner demonstratives by Yvonne Treis and Tanya Nikitina in a book called Demonstratives in discourse. The chapter

Is Barayin an endangered language?

Most of my research has been on Barayin, a language spoken by about 5000 people in the Guera region of Chad. My research has included two small grants for documenting endangered languages, and now I am preparing to submit a manuscript on the language to a book series called Studies of Endangered Languages. What is

Memories of the 1984 Famine in Chad

The World Food Program has been warning that disruptions related to COVID-19 could double the number of people in the world who are facing a food crisis, even to the point of being threatened with starvation. Those of us living in the wealthiest countries of the world have only heard about famine from history and

But what is said will remain

As part of my study of the Barayin language, I spent four months in Chad in 2017 mostly recording videos of people speaking their language, thanks to a generous grant from ELDP. Those videos are all archived and available online through ELAR. Several of the videos are of the main person who taught me about

Plural nouns in East Chadic

Back in January, Lameen Souag wrote a few blog posts (one, two, three, four) trying to untangle the complexity of plural nouns in Mubi, an East Chadic language spoken in the Guera region of Chad. Irregular plural forms are pretty common, but Mubi has an excessive number of ways of making plural nouns. When Carsten