Projects
ELDP Project "Documenting Àbèsàbèsì"
Àbèsàbèsì - often referred to as Akpes in literature - is a minority language spoken by approximately 10000 people in South-Western Nigeria. A gradual shift towards the regional lingua franca Yoruba is favored by rapid urbanization and unfavorable language attitudes. This project will be based in a town called Ikaramu (Ondo State/Nigeria) to document the language and create an audio-visual corpus with time-aligned transcriptions. The corpus will feed into an electronic reference grammar of the Àbèsàbèsì language, which will be developed as a case study.
PhD Project "An Electronic Reference Grammar of Àbèsàbèsì"
Traditional paper grammars are restricted to the linear format of a book and lack means to represent the relational taxonomy of a grammatical description. Language examples are restricted to the written format and lack verifiability as they are just a transcribed representation of the oral utterance. The format of an electronic reference grammar offers new possibilities of displaying a language’s grammar. It can include multimedia examples, structure grammar as form-meaning pairs in a relational taxonomy and give multiple display options. From the perspective of language documentation, this project develops and evaluates a digital format for reference grammars, illustrating it with data from the project "Documenting Àbèsàbèsì".