Anthropology 543 - African Language Structures


Presentations and Write-Up


The study of a language never comes to an end. People are still writing grammars and dictionaries of English. So one cannot say when your presentations and final write up for this course will be even remotely complete.

These items should be taken into account:

  1. Where is the language spoken, by whom … many, a few? Is it used by people and a second language? What is its status within the country where it is spoken? Is it taught in school, is it used as a language of instruction? ETC.
  2. How well is the language documented? In some cases the documentation is huge, in others it is substantial, and yet in others it is rather sparse.
  3. Give a bibliography of the documentation. In the case of a language like Swahili this would have to be a partial bibliography, of the most important and useful work. Comment on each item in the bibliography.
  4. Write up a discussion of the phonology
  5. Write up a discussion morphology of the selected language, concentrating on the its most interesting aspects. You will want to provide not just a list of morphemes but also parses of complex words and sentences.
  6. Discuss what lexical work has been done on the language. Go through several dictionaries and report how they are organized. Are they well done or just throw togethers.
  7. Has there been documentation of the language's oral literature? Give some examples.
  8. Finally, a general statement about what you found that was most interesting about the language. (This might just as well appear in an introduction.)
African Languages with adequate documentation in Alderman Library: