Documenting Vute ethnobiological inventories

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.

Wawa is a Mambiloid language spoken in the Adamawa Region of Cameroon. This project will focus on one of its four dialects, Mbenguédje, and aims to document ethnobiological inventories of the Mbenguédje Wawa and analyse lexical variation. With less than 500 speakers, Mbenguédje Wawa are shifting to other local languages and few children are competent in the language. The analysis of lexical variation will consider sociolinguistic factors and follow a social network approach to describe and investigate the multilingual, intense-contact setting. Primary investigator: Heather Todd

Project Details


Location: Cameroon, Middle Africa, Africa Organiser(s): Endangered Languages Documentation Programme Project partner(s): SOAS, University of London Funder(s): Arcadia Funding received: £56,911.00 Commencement Date: 01/2010 Project Status: Active
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