Placing the Dead and Nurturing the Living: Documentation of house- construction and terrace farming in Zargulla, an endangered Omotic language
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.
Zargulla (zay) is an endangered Omotic language spoken by c.a. 8000 speakers in south-west Ethiopia (62.60N 37.19E). Several Zargulla villages are characterized by terrace-farming and clusters of houses commemorating the dead in the higher parts of valleys, and residential areas in foothills and plateaus. The project will produce a linguistic and ethnographic documentation of this parallel and interactive spatial complex of farming and dwelling, which is endangered by socio-cultural changes. Its primary goal is to produce a multi-media digital corpus and a thematic dictionary on house-construction and terrace-farming, and, using these outputs, to study the grammar of space in Zargulla.
Primary investigator: Azeb Amha
Project Details
Location: Ethiopia, Eastern Africa, Africa
Organiser(s):
Endangered Languages Documentation Programme
Project partner(s): African Studies Centre Leiden
Funder(s):
Arcadia
Funding received: £152,855.00
Commencement Date: 01/2012
Project Status: Active
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