Within the framework of the Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, all Ethiopian languages enjoy equal state recognition and each ethnolinguistics group is granted large autonomy in the establishment of its own language policy. In this article we analyze the standardization of Sidaama and its role in the linguistic landscape of Hawassa, since 2020 the capital of the Sidaama Regional State. Alongside Sidaama, also Amharic and English -languages of wider communication that signal modernization and globalization- are extensively displayed in the linguistic landscape. Our findings highlight how, alongside and notwithstanding several orthographical inconsistencies, substantial progress has been made, in both standardization and lexical enrichment. Special attention is given to the acceptance and treatment of Amharic loans from European languages (mostly English), which are adopted into Sidaama and-often inconsistently-adapted through a process of re-graphization from the Ethiopic into the Latin script.
This article offers a linguistic and ethnographic analysis of a set of indigenous terms recorded by the Italian explorer Ugo Ferrandi (1851-1933) during his two-year stay in the town of Lugh (Luuq), southern Somalia, where he served as commander of an Italian outpost during the second Bottego expedition (1895-1897). The study specifically focuses on terms related to agriculture, cooking, and music-three core domains of material culture. Despite limitations posed by the absence of a standardised orthography and Ferrandi's lack of formal training in local languages, his notebooks provide rare lexical insights into pre-standard Somali and the multilingual environment of the Jubba region, where Somali (including the Maay variety), Oromo, Swahili, and other languages coexisted. Drawing on philological analysis, early bilingual dictionaries, contemporaneous travel accounts, and oral testimonies collected in Somalia during the 1980s, the study addresses issues of dialectal variation, orthographic practices, and semantic shifts. These findings contribute to a broader project aimed at developing a glossary of pre-standard Somali terminology, intended as a resource for linguists, anthropologists, and scholars of African material culture, and to facilitate the recovery and dissemination of this important yet understudied primary source.
HELLO Campania (Heritage Languages and the Languages of the Others in Campania) is a project focused on immigrant minority languages and their speakers in the Campania region of Italy. In this paper, we present the scientific background of the project and highlight its innovative aspects. We also describe the methodology used for data collection, and we provide an overview of the dataset and the structure of the HELLO Campania Collection, which has been archived and is available for consultation in the Eurac Research CLARIN Centre repository. The dataset consists of sociolinguistic interviews, language portraits, and linguistic tasks collected from speakers belonging to six communities: Bangladesh, Ghana, the Philippines, Senegal, Sri Lanka, and Ukraine. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it serves as a reference point for users interested in the HELLO Campania Collection, offering insights into the project's objectives and methodological framework. Second, it contributes to a broader reflection on methodological approaches in research on multilingualism and heritage languages, with particular attention to the advantages and limitations of sociolinguistic techniques, such as questionnaires, and elicited data, such as linguistic tasks.
This survey study investigates the application of indigenous knowledge in the sustainable livelihood development of Dao households in Thanh Hoa province. The successful application of Indigenous knowledge contributes to diversifying employment opportunities, enhancing income, improving community health, and promoting biodiversity conservation. However, challenges include the loss of Indigenous knowledge among the younger generation, pressure from market integration, and external development interventions. Factors such as age, education level, and access to agricultural extension services significantly impact the continued use and adaptation of Indigenous knowledge. Therefore, it is necessary to recognize and integrate Indigenous knowledge with modern science into local development policies to enhance the resilience and wellbeing of the Dao community, while supporting the transmission of this knowledge to future generations. The objective is to identify key Indigenous knowledge practices, analyze their contributions to livelihood sustainability (economic, social, and environmental), and explore factors influencing the maintenance and application of this knowledge in the context of contemporary socio-economic changes. We applied qualitative and quantitative research methods in selected Dao communities in Thanh Hoa. Data were collected through a survey of 200 households and 10 in-depth interviews with individuals and local leaders. We analyzed quantitative data using descriptive statistics and regression analysis with SPSS 22.0 software, and qualitative data were analyzed using thematic analysis.
Analyze the influence of cultural identity on the Muong people's ability to escape poverty sustainably in Thanh Hoa province, Vietnam under an interdisciplinary approach. Survey of 400 representatives of Muong households in 3 mountainous districts of Thanh Hoa province, qualitative research on documents related to the cultural identity of Muong people in Vietnam. Research to describe, and analyze the cultural identities of the Muong people, regression analysis of the influence of the cultural identities of the Muong people on the ability of the Muong people to escape poverty sustainably in Thanh Hoa, Vietnam, thence provides solutions to improve the ability of Muong people to escape poverty sustainably from the perspective of cultural heritage. The study concludes that cultural identity is a valuable heritage and a significant driving force for the sustainable economic development of ethnic minorities in Thanh Hoa.
This paper deals with the contribution that the study of oral tradition can make, both in terms of content and morphological and lexical features, to the reconstruction of the complex linguistic and historical development of remote areas of the world inhabited by hunter-gatherers (HG). The topic will be addressed using the example of an unpublished corpus of 23 stories, 7 songs and 2 riddles collected from the Ogiek of Mariashoni. The Ogiek are a group of semi-nomadic HGs with a delayed-return economy living surrounded by sedentary agricultural populations between the highlands and lowlands of the Mau Forest Escarpment in Kenya. For a more comprehensive perspective, the Ogiek corpus is here compared with a similar corpus of 16 Akie texts published in 2020 by K & ouml;nig et al. Given the position of both the Ogiek and the Akie as Dorobo living in symbiosis with the Maasai tribes of the region, the data on Maasai oral tradition contained in Kipuri 1993 is also considered meaningful for comparison.
The study of religious beliefs in Africa has represented for a long time a clashing encounter between "civilizations" (Huntington 1993). Therefore, pioneers of the movement of "conceptual decolonization" (P'Bitek 1971; Wiredu 1995) supported not only the use of African languages in literature and philosophy, but also the re-examination of African traditional religions as pillars to decolonise African knowledge. This paper aims to connect the theory to the practice of philosophy by investigating the critique of imported religions to Africa in William Mkufya's Swahili novels from his juvenilia works to Ziraili na Zirani ('Azrael and Zirani' 1999). Indeed, the study analytically investigates philosophical speculations on the existence of God and the afterlife, the problem of evil and the role of human free will in Ziraili na Zirani to illustrate how the Tanzanian intellectual deals with the plurality of faiths and recentralisation of knowledge.
The lives of most children from the Bhil community (the largest Adivasi or indigenous group in India) are characterised by extreme poverty, poor health conditions, and frequent migration. Amidst the socio-economic reality of their lives, what Bhil children learn about their past acquires significance. History learning constitutes a fundamental aspect of their identity formation, both within the Adivasi group and the nation-state. This paper presents an ethnographic account examining the extent to which learning history at school has enabled Bhil children in two blocks of Khargone district in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh to relate with their past and develop an understanding of history. It presents a thematic analysis of children's responses to questions related to the concept of history, the history of their region, and a popular symbol from India's history and draws out their epistemological, sociological, and pedagogical implications.
Linguistic fieldwork has seen a progression of frameworksof research since the 1960s, from an ethical model ('fieldwork on'), to advocacy ('fieldwork for'), to collaboration ('fieldwork with'), to empowerment ('fieldwork by') (Cameron et al. 1992, Grinevald 2003, 2007, Grinevald & Bert 2011). Each of these impacts onrelationships to the people researchers work with and the methods they use in the field. In addition, meta-documentation (documentation of the research itself) has emerged as an area of concern to fieldworkers and in need of elaboration and practice (Austin 2013). In this paper, I give a personal account of the models and methods I have used over 50 years of engagement with the Diyari (Dieri) Aboriginal community in South Australia (Austin 2014) as a form of reflexive meta-documentation in linguistic field-based research.
This paper discusses the various challenges encountered in documenting endangered languages spoken in extremely small language communities by speakers who are not always fluent in those languages. On the one hand, some specificities of these languages will be considered, namely their predominantly oral nature and the inherent multilingualism of these communities. On the other hand, some considerations on the nature of the linguistic datum in relation to different elicitation techniques will be proposed. The followingreflections are based on a long-lasting fieldwork experience in Walser communities in Italy
The present short paper gives an account of some findings on the Eritrean and Sudanese Nilo-saharan language Nara. The context is a recent four week long research conducted by the writer, partially in collaboration with Prof. Giancarlo Schirru, with two Nara speakers in Addis Ababa. The paper focusses on tone marking, plural formation and documentation. The data are preceded by some basic information on Nara and an overview of past research on the language.
The paper offers a preliminary overview of studies on lesser-described languages carried out in recent decades within the theoretical and methodological framework of Conversation Analyis, an ethnomethodologically inspired approach to the investigation of language use and social interaction. Reported results of large-scale comparative investigations on fundamental conversational mechanisms like turn-taking, sequential organization and repair thereby show the universal character of such practices, while highlighting peculiarities of languages like (sic)Akhoe Hai vertical bar vertical bar om, Cha'palaa, Murrinh-Phata, Yeli-Dnye and Tzeltal, in comparison with widespread Western European languages. It is thus discussed how Conversation Analysis - with its data-driven, emic, situated, and multimodal perspective on spoken interaction - can fruitfully complement language documentation work on lesser-described languages and speech communities.
In this paper we present some preliminary remarks on the preparation of a morphosyntactically annotated treebank for Saho within the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework, an annotation scheme used in a large collection of corpora, where Cushitic languagesare still marginally represented. We discuss some issues concerning tokenization, morphology, and syntax, with particular reference to cases where deviations from the descriptions proposed in the literature on Saho are deemed necessary, in order to accommodate Saho data within the UD architecture, and cases where some peculiarities of the Saho language require an expansion of the inventories put forward in UD.
Documentation of endangered languages has fostered a new discipline in linguistics, namely documentary linguistics and it has undergone many changes in its general approach in recent years. Mainly focussed on language description initially, it has evolved towards a deeper documentation of language practices within communities and, more recently, made a concrete contribution of linguists to speech communities for revitalisation of their languages, wherever this is the community's desire. Despite the changes that have occurred in the approach of many language documentation projects, it is still necessary to focus our attention on some issues which are crucial in the documentation of any language. Therefore, before moving towards the main issue of this paper that is, what counts as language in language documentation it is necessary to undertake a reflection on some basic concepts such as identity and speech community, as well as on the we-concept. The aim is to clarify for the reader the basic assumptions that I adopt in considering what counts as language in language documentation. I will start with the identity concept: therefore, I will discuss the concepts of 'we' and 'speech community', and I will propose some concluding remarks which offer further reflections on the language description and documentation framework.
This interdisciplinary study, which includes medical anthropology and semiotics, analyses knowledge of HIV/AIDS in Swahili plays from Tanzania. The analysis focuses on a semiotic and epistemological exploration of metaphors and other rhetorical devices used to speak about causes, symptoms and treatments for HIV/AIDS. The in-depth exploration of the culturally contextualised metaphorical images, created to refer to HIV/AIDS, is also conducted according to the multi-generic narrative strategy of the selected playscripts. The linguistic devices reflect not only an anthropological perspective, in which diverse additional therapies co-exist in a therapeutic continuum, but also an epistemological approach, where Afrocentric knowledge can be diluted. In other words, aesthetic and narrative devices illustrate clash and co-existence of plural epistemologies of healing. The selected plays are the following titles: Ushuhuda wa Mifupa ('the Testimony of the Bones', Ngozi 1990); Kilio Chetu ('Our lament', MAF 1995); Giza ('Darkness', Jilala 2004); Kilio cha Jeska ('Jeska's Cry', Mghanga 2004); Orodha ('The List', Reynolds 2006); Mwalimu Rose ('The Teacher Rose', Mghanga 2007); Judges on Trial (Nyoni 2009) and The Monster (Chikoti 2009); Zimwi la UKIMWI ('The Beast', Morgan 2010); Anaona Anasikia ('He sees and hears', Abeid 2014); and Embe Dodo ('The Small Mango', Makukula 2015). The final objective of this study will be to demonstrate how Swahili literature develops and communicates not only Afrocentric knowledge about HIV/AIDS, but also a philosophy of inclusion for plural heterogenous ways of knowing.
Starting from the testimonies documented in a corpus of travel reports belonging to very different textual genres but united by their temporal collocation in the first forty years of the second half of the 19th century, the contribution proposes to focus on the images of Italian travellers in contact with the linguistic-communicative universes of pre-colonial Abyssinia. Representations, attitudes, meta- and epilinguistic annotations about the local repertory realities are analysed through the use of indicators deemed representative of subjectively perceived linguistic-communicative diversity and at the same time of the ethnolinguistic sensibilities of the time. The final aim is to outline the effects of the contact between Italian travellers and the languages and peoples of the Horn of Africa at a time still immune to, or barely touched by, the ideological and cultural conditioning that in the immediately following phases would lead to support policies inspired by principles of linguistic substitution. resoconti contatto interlinguistico.
A typical Tummase Dane funerary ritual of a middle class woman is described and investigated in the light of a first-hand fieldwork experience. Buddhist beliefs that form the basics of this ritual are mentioned and connected to the actual events that took place during the ceremony, along with the agency and roles of the individuals that animated it. Dana (almsgiving), sumptuous offering of food and gift-giving, self-abnegation and unconditional help given by the deceased's relatives to the monks and community are signs of an aspiration to correct and formal religious conduct, but also evidences of an underlying assertiveness and manifestation of public wealth and recognition within the community, seen as a microcosm in which social status is evaluated thanks to moral but also material acts. Personal, subjective agency then participates in the long-standing of traditional processes, as it is explained by Marx in The Theses on Feuerbach (1888). Finally, a tentative explanation of the accordance of social and economic (political) tendencies in this festive ritual is given through a comparison with the Potlatch of North-West American populations.
Man has always used plants to cure himself. He attributed to the Providence, then to Nature the fact that beside a disease, there is always its remedy. The Fulani of Diamare have a great knowledge of plants and have adopted against fevers remedies available in all seasons. Can we say that all these remedies are effective in themselves? It is up to phytobiochemistry to answer the question.
