Pike Center awards two 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. The program solicits grant applications three times per year, but the previous cycle was an apparent victim of pandemic-related shutdowns as no applications were received.  We are pleased to announce that applications resumed in the latest cycle and two new grants have been awarded.

$1,250 has been awarded to Boone Aldridge for a project to “Publish a scholarly biography of Kenneth L. Pike.” Pike, who is the namesake for our center, was an important evangelical scholar and leader of the mid-to-late twentieth century, but he is not as well known as deserved. This biography, entitled Kenneth L. Pike: An Evangelical Mind, is aimed primarily at the academic community and secondarily the wider public. It will demonstrate how one evangelical scholar served God and the world with his entire heart, soul, and mind. The book has been accepted for publication by an academic press and the funds will help the author to pay the typesetting and indexing fees charged by the publisher. Dr. Aldridge is Corporate Historian for SIL International; he holds a Ph.D. in Religious History from the University of Stirling.

$2,500 has been awarded to Virginia Beavon-Ham for a project entitled “Testing the tool A→Z+T for tone documentation and analysis.”  The marking of tone poses a special challenge in developing the writing systems for many languages. Another problem is that those with the needed expertise in tone analysis may not be available to do the needed research on location. Beavon-Ham and her colleagues have developed a software tool that non-experts can use to elicit and archive a collection of cataloged recordings that can be used by an expert who could be located anywhere in the world to do the tone analysis.  The grant will allow this team to run a trial of the tool with speakers of Bafanji (a Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon), publish the documentation on how to use the tool, and present the results of their work at a conference of African linguistics. Dr. Beavon-Ham is the Linguistics Coordinator for SIL Cameroon and a Pike Scholar; she holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Leiden University.