Published: May 1, 2014

CU Linguistics PhD student Sam Beer has won a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement grant for a project entitled "A Grammar of Nyang'i with Historical-Comparative Notes". Nyang'i is a nearly-extinct member of the Kuliak language family, remembered by only one or two elderly inhabitants of a remote valley in the Nyangea Mountains of northeastern Uganda. Previous research in the Nyang’i language has been hindered by difficulty of access—both to the geographically remote region in which the language is spoken and to clearly translated data, as Karimojong is the only second language spoken by Nyang’i speakers. As a result, existing scholarship is limited to a small section of a single article. This project aims to produce a corpus of transcribed, glossed and translated audio- and video-recorded texts. The corpus will not only form the basis for the first grammatical description and lexicon of Nyang’i, but will also provide a resource from which future linguists and members of the Nyang’i community will gain access to the Nyang’i language beyond the lifetime of its remaining speakers. 

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