Projekt

Laal is an unclassified language spoken in two villages in Southern Chad. It is very likely to be a language isolate, the only surviving member of a former language family spoken in the area. Laal has only about 750 speakers. The language is still passed on to children in the villages, but not anymore in town. More and more speakers leave the villages to settle in town, putting the language at a high risk of attrition and disappearance. Additionally, the growing strength of Islam in the villages as well as in town is causing a rapid and drastic cultural shift threatening traditional knowledge and practices in the very short term. The project aims at documenting both the language and the cultural practices. In the two-year extension of the project, the linguistic documentation will focus on syntax, semantics and information structure (Lionnet), the cultural documentation on oral history (Hoinathy) and the ethnomusicological documentation on pre-islamic songs (Loncke). A newly established ethnobotanist subproject will document the Laal plant nomenclature and taxonomy, the knowledge and practices related to plants and their various uses.

• Prof. Dr. Tom Güldemann

  Humboldt-Universität Berlin
  Philosophische Fakultät III
  Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften
  Seminar für Afrikawissenschaften
  Berlin
  

• Florian Lionnet, M.A.

  University of California - Berkeley
  Department of Linguistics
  Berkeley, CA
  USA