Describing endangered languages
Experiences from a PhD grammar project in Africa
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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