Pike Center awards three small grants

Through its Small Grants Program, the Pike Center sponsors research and publication that address issues faced by language communities on the margins of society. We are pleased to announce that three grants have been awarded in the latest cycle of this program.

$3,000 has been awarded to Hazel Gray for a project on “Bungu grammatical tone orthography testing.” Bungu is a Bantu language of Tanzania with 30,000 speakers in which literature is being developed for the first time. The language has grammatical tone, but writing the tone complicates the orthography.  An overly complicated orthography will not be used; however, one that is too simple will result in confusion and lack of comprehension for readers. This grant will support the formal testing needed to establish the optimal approach to grammatical tone in the orthography. A similar problem is found across Africa, so the published results could serve as a guide to many other orthography developers. Ms. Gray serves with SIL Tanzania as a Linguistic Specialist; she holds a Masters in applied mathematics from the University of Bath.

$3,000 has been awarded to Joseph Leman for a project entitled “Applied discourse analysis in Magar Kham varieties.” Magar Kham is a group of closely-related Tibeto-Burman languages in Nepal. Some varieties have been written while other remain primarily spoken. It is not clear to what extent the written varieties will serve all varieties of Magar Kham. The current research will collect a corpus of natural texts in the two varieties and perform a comparative analysis of the discourse patterns. Published results will include a comparative discourse analysis of two Magar Kham varieties and an evaluation of the results of computer adaptation in terms of its discourse naturalness. Mr. Leman serves with SIL Nepal as a Field Linguist; he is pursuing a Masters degree at the Canada Institute of Linguistics. 

$2,825 has been awarded to Dr. Rebecca Paterson for a project entitled “Towards the Classification of Kainji: A window on Niger-Congo.”  Kainji is a group of about 60 related languages spoken in west-central Nigeria. SIL and partners currently have projects in fifteen of these languages.  They form a subgroup within the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo family. This project involves a historical-comparative reconstruction of the sound system and noun class affixes of Northwest Kainji. Knowledge of sound changes across the dialect continua should better inform language development efforts as to how far materials in one language variety might be usable by other varieties. Another impact is that this information about the Kainji languages, once shared, will challenge the status quo related to the general understanding of Niger-Congo. The funding will enable Dr. Paterson to present her findings at a premier international conference on historical linguistics as a step toward publishing the results. Paterson serves with SIL Nigeria as a Linguistics Consultant; she holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Oregon.