Oct 7, 2008

UC Berkeley linguists studying Ki-Nzadi, a previously undescribed language

This is really exciting!

One of my linguistics professors at UC Berkeley (where I did my undergraduate work), Prof Larry Hyman, is currently conducting a field methods class with a speaker of Ki-Nzadi, a language that has never been studied before from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

And here's the article that goes along with the video.

And yes, there are around 7,000 languages spoken in the world today - don't believe people who tell you that there are around 70-80!

3 comments:

Nick said...

Where was this language spoken?

Ed said...

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, at least. It's not even listed (let alone described) in the Ethnologue from SIL yet!

Ed said...

And Ki-Nzadi is still being spoken.

A field methods class is basically a group session with an actual speaker of the target language. It's quite exciting, especially in a case (like this one) where there's nothing (or close to nothing) written about it.