Documentation of archaic Akha, the register of the shaman, with a comparison to modern spoken Akha
The Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) provides grants worldwide to for the linguistic documentation of endangered language and knowledge. Grantees create multimedia collection of endangered languages. These collections are preserved and made freely available through the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) housed at the library of SOAS University of London.
This project focuses on documenting archaic Akha, a code that is not mutually intelligible with modern Akha (ISO 639-3: akh). There are about 500,000 speakers of Akha in Burma, China, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. However, according to community reports, the archaic code is spoken by perhaps only 100 elderly shaman.Therefore, the goal of this project (based out of Chiang Rai, Thailand) is to create a corpus of archaic Akha that may be used by the community for educational materials, and also serve as the basis for a reference grammar of the language.
Primary investigator: Jacob Terrell
Project Details
Location: Thailand, South-Eastern Asia, Asia
Organiser(s):
Endangered Languages Documentation Programme
Project partner(s): University of Hawaii
Funder(s):
Arcadia
Funding received: £9,285.00
Commencement Date: 01/2005
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