AAP supported multi-institutional fieldwork results in monograph on Tanzanian endangered language

Professor Ngonyani, pictured right, poses with team in front of partner institution Tumaini Univeristy, Dar Es Salaam College.

MSU Linguistics Professor Deogratias Ngonyani, a previous recipient of AAP grant funding, has successfully published a monograph entitled “Chinyanja of Tanzania: A Grammatical Sketch”. Ngonyani was part of a team including Ann Biersteker (MSU), Angelina Kioko (USIU), and Josephat Rugemalira (previously Tumaini University, currently Kampala International University) received funding from AAP from July 2017 to 2019 for fieldwork aimed at documenting endangered languages in East Africa. This work is essential to understanding and preserving languages in areas such as Lake Nyasa, Tanzania. By connecting with Swahili-speaking youth, this research can also help mitigate the endangerment of local languages.

Professor Ngonyani has collected materials on languages on Dhaisu, Ndendeule, Ngoni, Kisi, and Nyanja. Most materials are located in notebooks and on CDS and hard drives as audio files.

This grant brought together researchers from two member institutions of the AAP consortium, Michigan State University and United States International University-Africa (USIU), as well as Tumaini University in Dar es Salaam. With multi-institutional work on language documentation activities through this grant, a sustainable collaboration was created.

Culture and education, two AAP priority areas, were the focus of this team’s project, in part through a 2018 workshop with younger researchers in Nairobi, Kenya. AAP supported logistics for this workshop, allowing the team to focus on making their work more accessible through archiving processes. Digital documentation of language can transform lives by preserving cultural material and cultural diversity. Through this workshop and program, early career researchers increased their capabilities within the field and aided with archiving processes of research materials.

Data gathered by Professor Ngonyani, pictured in the back center, are resources for language description, theoretical studies, and comparative study of Bantu languages. Additionally, language materials will help preserve cultural diversity within Tanzania.

Professor Ngonyani collects wordlists, personal narratives, folktales, songs, and elicited sentences or phrases to analyze endangered languages. This will enable him to create dictionaries or monographs of these languages.

Ngonyani and his research partners were able to attend the launch of AAP in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 2017. Ngonyani states that the launch event "helped us make connections with different people including native people of the language that we worked with.” Building international relationships is essential to AAP’s work and Ngonyani’s linguistic research.

We celebrate the publishing of Ngonyani’s monograph and look forward to the future work from the team, as well as hearing from our other grantee recipients on the impact AAP had on their work. Ngonyani hopes to publish the monograph in Swahili in the near future so as to better connect with youth by Lake Nyasa and protect the language from further endangerment.