Pike Center awards small grant for orthography research

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 another grant has been awarded in the latest cycle of this program.

$2,800 has been awarded to Dr. Andreas Joswig for a project on “Orthography Research for the Hamer-Banna Language.” Hamer-Banna is an Afro-Asiatic language of Ethiopia with 80,000 speakers. Hamer and Banna are similar enough to have been classified as dialects of the same language, and yet separate literature development has been ongoing. These efforts have run into problems concerning the representation of glottal stop, vowel length, diphthongs, and suprasegmentals like stress and tone.  An even deeper issue is whether a solution for unified language development can be found. This grant will support participatory research into both the sound systems of the two dialects and the attitudes of their speakers in order to arrive at an optimal orthography solution. Dr. Joswig serves with SIL Ethiopia as a Senior Linguistics Consultant; he holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Leiden.