This is to invite you to participate in the aforementioned research dissemination seminar scheduled to take place on Thursday, 11th February 2021 in the E-Learning Room at CTF1, Level 4 starting at 9:00am. The research project was supported by the Government of Uganda through the Makerere Research and Innovations Fund (Mak-RIF).
***UNIT: Department of Linguistics, English Language Studies and Communication Skills
***PROJECT TITLE: Corpus Development of the “So” Language for Community Empowerment
***PROJECT DISSEMINATION SEMINAR PRESENTED BY - Dr. Celestino Oriikiriza (Principal Investigator), Dr. Fridah Katushemererwe (Co-investigator), Dr. Deo Kawalya (Co-investigator), Mr. Michael Wangotta (Co-investigator), and Mr. Luke Francis Kiwanuka (Librarian) in conjunction with partners: Mr. Richard Nzogi (SIL International, Entebbe), Dr. Sigal Uziel-Karl (Achva Academic College, Israel), Ms. Maria Stolen (SIL International, Entebbe), Mr. Gift Asiku (SIL International, Entebbe), and Mr. Michael Ongunda (SIL International, Entebbe)
***ONLINE PARTICIPATION
Register in advance for this meeting:
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
***PROJECT SUMMARY
This project aimed at developing a documentary corpus (a collection of oral transcriptions) of "So", one of the critically endangered languages in Uganda in Karamoja region. The language is commonly known as Tepeth. The corpus was targeted to serve as a source of data for use in describing the linguistic nature of the language, establishing its spelling system, compiling its vocabulary in dictionary form, and writing the literature, culture, and history of the people using their language. The goal is to preserve the language and to make it a usable tool for development and empowerment of the speakers, who are a marginalised community. The specific objectives of the project were: to conduct a mini survey of the language, to record the spoken form of the language, to create oral transcriptions of the recordings, to create translated versions of the recorded data, and to archive the data in an accessible and retrievable form. In order to achieve the objectives, language survey questionnaires were administered; audio and visual recordings of "So" narratives, conversations, dialogues, songs, personal histories, specific vocabulary, formulaic expressions, procedural descriptions, and the day-to-day language forms were made from the native speakers. The surveys were analysed to further understand the social and linguistic situation of the language. The recordings were labelled with an ID each, edited, processed into careful speech, and translated into Ng’akarimojong, Pokoot, and English as languages of wider communication. The source recordings together with their careful speech versions and translations constitute the documentary corpus. They have been archived in the Makerere University Institutional Repository (MakIR) together with a mini survey report, for a follow-up project to describe the linguistic nature of "So", and for accessibility by linguists, researchers, policymakers, among others, who would like to use the data for reference and analysis.
