Arts and Letters Linguist Documents Threatened African Language
Deogratias Ngonyani, associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages at Michigan State University, has been awarded a research fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation as part of the agencies’ joint "Documenting Endangered Languages" program, which aims to create and preserve records of languages threatened with extinction.
Ngonyani, who specializes in morphology, descriptive linguistics and African languages, is one of twelve U.S. winners of the fellowship. He will spend the 2006-07 academic year in the southern highlands of Tanzania, where he will conduct research on Kikisi, a Bantu language spoken by fewer than 10,000 people in four Kisi villages (Lifuma, Lupingu, Makonde and Nindi) on the northeastern shore of Lake Malawi. It is one of more than 120 languages spoken in Tanzania.
He will survey the use of the Kikisi language and study its vocabulary and linguistic features; write a descriptive grammar; create audio and video recordings of folktales, conversations, rituals, songs, poems and language games; transcribe oral traditions into written form for wider use in the villages; and explore the nature of words in language using examples from Kikisi. By collecting data related to syntax and word structure, Ngonyani’s research will add invaluable data to the field of comparative Bantu linguistics and clarify the relationship of Kikisi to other languages in southern Tanzania. In addition, he will collaborate with colleagues based at the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Göteborg University (Sweden) on "Languages of Tanzania," a linguistic atlas of all languages in the country.
Experts estimate that more than half of the approximately 7,000 currently used human languages are headed for extinction in the next hundred years. Ngonyani notes that Kikisi is threatened by the increasing dominance of Kiswahili (Swahili), which is the official language of Tanzania, and by related languages with much larger numbers of speakers, including Kinyakyusa, Kikinga, Kipangwa and Kimanda.
"The project is based on the recognition that every language expresses a unique culture and worldview," says Ngonyani, who has taught Swahili and linguistics at MSU since 1999 and is a native speaker of Kindendeule, another Tanzanian language. "The death of any language means the disappearance of knowledge and linguistic data. So the documentation of endangered languages is part of a global effort to preserve cultural diversity and to understand the very nature of human communication."
Ngonyani was born in Tanzania and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Dar es Salaam before coming to the United States in 1991. He earned master’s and doctoral degrees in linguistics from UCLA in 1996.