ASH Research Team
Project Overview
Marlo & Grollemund
Documenting Luyia Together
Michael R. Marlo, Department of English, [email protected]
Rebecca Grollemund, Department of English, [email protected]
General project synopsis and timeline
This project will give students practical experience carrying out professional research in
linguistics, by studying three underdocumented varieties of the Luyia language cluster of
western Kenya: Bukusu, Tiriki, and Wanga. Students will work with original audio recordings
and phonetic transcriptions collected by Prof. Marlo through field work in Kenya to contribute
to two types of collaborative publications for each language: (1) a talking dictionary, in which
users can play sound files to hear how each entry is pronounced, and (2) a written description
and analysis of the language’s tonal system. As the project develops, we intend to cross
disciplinary boundaries, following Prof. Grollemund’s lead, by exploring the historical
implications of differences among the Luyia tone systems.
After the team is selected, students will be assigned to three small groups, one group per
language, with three students per group. We will have a weekly team meeting with all faculty
and student participants. During the first two weeks, we will meet twice per week to train
students to use acoustic editing software (Audacity) and check transcriptions against the audio
recordings using other software (Praat). In subsequent meetings, the small student groups will
take turns updating the team on their progress verifying transcriptions and interpreting the
results, while also being introduced to select readings from the literature. By the end of the first
semester, we will have verified tonal transcriptions and developed a preliminary classification
of the tonal patterns of the words in the dictionary of each language, which will be the basis for
the first team presentation.
We will then transition to writing tasks and preparing professional presentations of the
research, and identifying additional data types that may need to be collected in further
research. By the end of the second semester, we will have prepared a description and analysis
in each language of how the tonal pronunciations of individual words change in phrases, which
will be the basis for our presentations and publication drafts. We anticipate that research on
Luyia tonal history will extend beyond the project period.
Brief description of student majors/skill sets you hope to attract to your team.
The main qualities we are looking for in students are (1) eagerness to learn about a language
the student knows nothing about and (2) strong analytical abilities. Some background in foreign
languages, computer languages, or linguistics is desirable. Experience with a tone language (e.g.
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Yoruba) or musical training may be beneficial, but is not required.
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ASH Research Team
Project Proposal and Description
Marlo & Grollemund
Documenting Luyia Together
Michael R. Marlo, Department of English, [email protected]
Rebecca Grollemund, Department of English, [email protected]
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Introduction
There are approximately 7000 languages spoken around the world. However, based on
the criteria defined by UNESCO, more than half are threatened with extinction in the next
century. Like the loss of bio-diversity, the global loss of cultural and linguistic diversity is a
threat to human society. When a language dies, the knowledge, concepts, and traditions
encoded by the language die with it, and a possible window into the workings of the human
mind is forever lost. Language loss threatens the science of linguistics, since linguistic theory is
developed mainly through the observation of existing languages. As most languages of the
world are currently underdescribed, language documentation is more important than ever.
The proposed research team will engage MU students in professional research-inprogress led by Prof. Michael Marlo that documents a cluster of three understudied languages
of western Kenya: Bukusu, Tiriki, and Wanga. Students will develop the first talking
dictionaries and the first comprehensive published studies of tone for each of these languages,
working with original audio recordings and phonetic transcriptions collected by Marlo
primarily through fieldwork in Kenya. Prof. Rebecca Grollemund will contribute expertise to
the project in the area of historical (Bantu) linguistics—a promising area for future development
of research on the project.
Students will be exposed to cross-linguistic diversity and the importance of language,
while gaining research experience in linguistics and language documentation, and technical
expertise in audio-editing and audio-analysis software, all of which can be built on in future
coursework, honors theses, or graduate school. The project will result in Marlo’s research on
Luyia languages moving forward considerably. Grollemund, who will be a new faculty member
at Mizzou in Fall 2016, will be quickly integrated into the linguistics community at Mizzou, and
Marlo and Grollemund will lay the foundation for joint projects in the future. The collaboration
will strengthen the relationship among faculty and students at Mizzou.
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Luyia, language documentation, and tone
Bukusu, Tiriki, and Wanga are three members of a cluster of closely related languages
called Luyia. Luyia is part of the vast Bantu family, with over 500 languages, spanning from
Cameroon to southern Somalia to South Africa. Luyia itself is quite diversified and includes
over 20 language varieties in western Kenya and eastern Uganda.
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Bukusu is by far the largest Luyia community in Kenya, with a population of 1.4 million
as of the 2009 census. The next largest is Logooli, with a population of about 600,000. Wanga
has a population of about 300,000, and Tiriki 200,000. The smallest Luyia community is Tura,
with 30,000. While most Luyia communities are individually small, together they have a
combined population of over 5 million, constituting the second largest ethnic group in Kenya.
Luyia is not currently endangered, but there are threats to its long-term stability.
Cultural and environmental changes are resulting in significant changes to the lexicon of all
Luyia varieties, as flora and fauna terms are being rapidly lost. In addition, Luyia children
raised in urban, multiethnic, and diasporic communities tend not to learn their mother tongue,
and instead shift early in life to Swahili and English. Young Luyias tend to give up their
language when they go to urban areas, even when they are competent speakers of the
language. If Luyia varieties become stigmatized as being the language of poor country
bumpkins, then language loss in Luyia communities will be accelerated.
Linguists can contribute to the preservation and revitalization of languages by
documenting, describing, and analyzing them and by working with communities who are eager
to participate in the study of their language. There are three main types of works that linguists
typically produce in language documentation efforts: (1) dictionaries, (2) grammars, and (3)
collections of texts. Linguistic documentation of this type is essential for the creation of
pedagogical materials; it also supports various types of community- and government-based
language programs, including literacy development.
Despite the fact that Luyia is such a large community within Kenya, there are very few
materials available for teaching Luyia, and no professional dictionary, grammar, or text
collection for any Luyia variety to base such materials on. Marlo’s collaborative research
project, Structure and tone in Luyia, funded by the National Science Foundation seeks to fill this
gap, by producing a dictionary, grammar, and text collection for Bukusu, Tiriki, Wanga, and
one other Luyia variety, Logooli. Such materials can be a source of pride for each community,
and can accelerate other programs to support the learning and transmission of the languages.
The present project will contribute toward this effort by significantly advancing work on the
talking dictionary and the description and analysis of the tonal system of each language.
Working in collaboration with native speakers of each language, Marlo developed
preliminary drafts of dictionaries of Bukusu (2008), Tiriki (2013), and Wanga (2008), which the
present project builds on. Of all of Marlo’s research available on his Academia.edu profile, these
dictionaries are by far the most widely accessed resources. The Bukusu dictionary has four
times the number of views of his most accessed journal article! While relatively popular with
online searches, the unpublished versions of these dictionaries are not yet suitable as
professional linguistics resources because the entries do not have phonetic transcriptions that
accurately show how the words are pronounced.
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The Luyia writing systems used in the first drafts of the dictionaries do not encode two
important phonetic features of words in Luyia: (1) vowel length and (2) tone. Throughout Luyia
languages, there are pairs of words that differ only in the length of a vowel, e.g. the Wanga
verbs oxúnáβá ‘to sew’, with a short vowel, vs. oxúnáaβ́ á ‘to net-fish’, with a long vowel. There
are also pairs of words that differ only in tone, e.g. the Tiriki nouns mwiixo ‘cooking stick’,
which has no H tone, vs. mw�í xo ‘relative’, which has a high tone on its first vowel. In order to
describe and understand precisely how words are pronounced in Luyia languages, vowel length
and tone must be marked. Thus, the present project has the goal of updating the dictionaries so
that vowel length and tone are accurately transcribed.
Once individual words in each language are accurately transcribed, additional research
is possible into the language’s tonal system, i.e. how differences in pitch are used to distinguish
words and phrases. Studies of tone of the type we intend to complete have played a key role in
the development of linguistic theory and will continue to do so in coming years. While around
half of the world’s languages are tonal, we have detailed descriptions of only a small fraction of
the world’s tone systems. Thus, linguists must continue documenting tone, contributing to the
empirical database on which our understanding of human language is based. The need to do so
is more urgent than ever given the worldwide endangerment of so many languages.
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Team member roles, expected outcomes, and presentation plans
The team will work with primarily with original audio-recorded interviews that Prof.
Marlo has conducted with speakers of Bukusu, Tiriki, and Wanga. In these interviews, Marlo
works with one speaker at a time, asking the speaker to pronounce individual words and larger
phrases built out of these words. Thus, Marlo asks the speaker questions like, “How do you say
‘dog’ in your language?” In Bukusu, it is: éembwa; in Tiriki: �ꜜ́ s��́ ́mbwa 1; and in Wanga: imbwá .
Next, Marlo asks how the plural is pronounced—tʃ� ́imbwa , ts� ́�ꜜ́ s� ́� ́mbwa, and tsiimbwá,
respectively—and may then ask a follow up question like, “how do you say ‘his dog’?”, which
would be � ́ꜜs��́ ́mbwá ꜜyé in Tiriki. Marlo then moves on to the next noun in the list, and the cycle
repeats. The Tiriki and Wanga dictionaries have about 2000 nouns and 1500 verbs; the Bukusu
dictionary has about 1500 additional words. Marlo has transcribed (or will have transcribed) all
of the words and phrases to be analyzed in the team project by Fall 2016.
Students’ work will consist initially of processing audio sound files, using Audacity
audio-editing software to extract the speaker’s pronunciations of the words and phrases so they
can be linked to the dictionary entry for the word and searched for later. Once the archive of
audio files is built up, students will check Marlo’s transcriptions against the processed sound
clips to finalize the phonetic entries of each dictionary. As students verify the transcriptions,
they will classify the words into different categories by their tonal patterns, which will inform
the written description of the language’s tonal system. At this point of the project, it will also
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The downward pointing arrow means that the following high tone is pronounced with slightly lower pitch than the
immediately preceding high tone.
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be appropriate to (judiciously) share readings from the literature with students. This will
include information about tone in other Bantu languages, and on the theoretical framework
that is normally used to interpret transcribed tonal data. We plan to complete the work of
processing the sound files, verifying transcriptions, and identifying the tonal classes of words
in each language by the end of the first semester.
Students will also investigate phrases and sentences to determine how tonal patterns of
individual words change in context. For instance, ‘dog’ ends in a high tone when it is followed
́ bwa ‘dog’. This
by another word, as in � ́ꜜs� ́� ́mbwá ꜜyé ‘his dog’, but not when it is in isolation � ́ꜜs� ́�m
is because there is a general rule of pronunciation in Tiriki that lowers high tones at the end of
phrases. Consideration of the pronunciations of words in phrases will result in a greater
understanding of the rules of tonal pronunciation in the language, and these results will be
captured in a written description and analysis of the tonal system. Studying the tonal patterns
of phrases in each language will be the emphasis of the second semester of research.
As the phrasal tone patterns of the language are studied, it is likely that students will
discover data types (particular combinations of words with specific properties) that are needed
but are unrepresented or underrepresented in our corpus. It is important that we identify these
gaps so that the appropriate additional data can be collected from speakers.
Students will work together in three-member groups. There will be three groups, one
for each language: Bukusu, Tiriki, and Wanga. Ideally, each group will have at least one
experienced linguistics major, who can serve as a group leader and assist with technical
matters. Students will process sound files individually, but will work with their groupmates for
checking transcriptions, analyzing, and describing the data, and then presenting the results
back to the rest of the team during the weekly lab meetings. Grollemund and Marlo will meet
with the smaller groups as necessary to discuss any issues that are specific to their language,
while issues that will be discussed in the weekly full team meeting.
Presentations during the lab meetings will expose students to data from the other
languages that they have not worked on. Students will note many similarities between the
languages, but also some differences. For instance, the word meaning ‘woman’ is ómuxasi in
Bukusu, múxáli in Tiriki’, and omuxási in Wanga. Comparison of the languages reveals that
Tiriki consistently lacks the initial o- prefix found in Bukusu and Wanga, and the consonantvowel sequence [li] in Tiriki is pronounced as [si] in Bukusu and Wanga. When Tiriki and
Wanga have a high tone at the beginning of a noun root (-xáli, -xási), Bukusu also has a high
tone, but it is pronounced on the first vowel of the word (on the prefix ó-). Tiriki has a regular
rule of pronunciation that vowels become high-toned before another high-toned vowel, which
is why the mú- prefix is high-toned.
Cross-Luyia and cross-Bantu comparisons will lead to additional research opportunities
on Luyia tonal history, an area where Prof. Grollemund will take the lead, as she is an expert in
Bantu historical linguistics. By comparing the tonal data from Bukusu, Tiriki, and Wanga, and
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data from other Bantu languages spoken in the region, we hope to eventually be able to
reconstruct what the Proto-Luyia tone system was like and how each of the daughter languages
has diverged from the earlier system. We would like to extend the use of the ‘Phylogenetic
Comparative Method’ to a new area—the evolutionary history of tone—by applying this method
to data from the Luyia languages. Studying such questions in depth will be a good topic for an
individual research project or honors thesis completed after the current project period.
Students will present their research at a Linguistics Program colloquium in 2017, at the
Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievements Spring Forum, and at other appropriate
venues. They will submit abstracts to present at the Annual Conference on African Linguistics, to
be held at Indiana University in Spring 2017.
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Philosophy and plan on mentoring undergraduate researchers
We encourage undergraduate students to become involved in linguistic research, study
foreign languages and cultures, and participate in study abroad programs. These are
opportunities provide cross-cultural and cross-linguistic experiences that will be personally
rewarding to students and give them a greater understanding of human diversity. Term
projects in Marlo’s courses involve the collection, description, and analysis of original linguistic
data, often on understudied languages, which gives students first-hand experience in linguistic
research. A goal of our teaching is to train students in professional writing, providing ample
feedback to make student writing as clear, precise, and informative as possible.
Marlo has mentored a relatively large number of students at the undergraduate level in
research projects in linguistics. He has previously experimented with team-based approaches.
In one case, five students continued research begun during the Linguistics capstone course,
Field Methods in Linguistics, on the Nigerian language, Igala. Under Marlo’s supervision, the
students worked together to merge their individual research into a collaborative paper draft,
which then two students and Marlo continued to develop into a 120-page monograph through
interviews with their Igala speaker, while two other students helped process audio files
generated during those interviews. In a second case, Marlo formed a research team with five
students and a postdoctoral fellow in the semester before the Field Methods class to study prior
literature on the language of the Field Methods class and to review recordings of speakers’
pronunciations collected in previous research. This gave us a head start in the research,
allowing us to make greater advances in understanding specific aspects of the structure of the
language than otherwise would have been possible. Ultimately, all of the students who had
participated in the research team contributed to collaborative research that was presented at
the Annual Conference on African Linguistics later that academic year.
Grollemund has also worked closely with undergraduate students as part of a large
research group to code data as part of her research, and values team-based research. We would
like to build on the prior experience of both PIs in the current project and set a standard for
collaborative research in the humanities at Mizzou.
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