EGA WEB ARCHIVE

an endangered languages documentation initiative
 
(provisional repository)
 

Goals and description

The Ega initiative aims to develop a model for the computational language documentation of an endangered language, involving

• design and performance of fieldwork & documentation
• of the forms & functions of an endangered language,
• based on workable, efficient computational linguistic & phonetic methods (see article on the WELD paradigm), and
• including the development of appropriate software: fieldwork, description and documentation support tools.

The focus is on Ega, an endangered language isolate so far assigned to the Kwa family and surrounded by a language of the Kru family (Dida), in the Ivory Coast, West Africa.

The language is called "Ega" by most speakers and by scientists, and "Diès" by Dida speakers and some Ega speakers. Ega is the most western of the Kwa languages, the only Kwa language west of the Bandama River, and an isolate in the Nyo cluster.

The average age of fluent speakers is high, and the degree of intermingling (intermarriage and bidirectional migration) with the enclaving Dida speaking population is also high. In school, children speak French in the classroom and, typically, a regional vehicular language such as Dioula (Jula) with their schoolfriends, which weakens intergeneration transmission of the language.

Requirements specification

The Ega documentation model specifies the production of documentation which is empirically and hermeneutically complete. This means that the documentation should be sufficiently detailed at empirical (essentially: acoustic and visual), structural (essentially: grammatical and lexical) and functional (essentially: interpretative semantic and pragmatic) levels, to enable the documentation to be used effectively by the descendants of the community and by scientists in the permanent absence of native speakers.

The model is based on four generic methodological requirements:

1. Empirical: combining annotated audio & video recordings of situated and interview data with written data.
2. Descriptive: dealing with phonetics, prosody, lexicon, grammar, semantics, discourse from linguistically & ethnographically informed perspectives.
3. Formal: descriptions suitable for both human (lay and scientific) and computational use, and documents structured in well-defined formats meeting standards of spoken language engineering & text technology.
4. Infrastructural: using portable and low cost technologies, and maximally available to interested communities as open language data and open source software.

Programme

Scientific interest in text technology and computational documentation of languages is a major feature of work at Universität Bielefeld and at Université de Cocody, Abidjan (Département de Linguistique and Institut de Linguistique Appliquée), Côte d'Ivoire. The scientific interest in Ega, in addition to intrinsic interest in cooperating with partners in an endangered language community, concerns the linguistic richness of the Ega language including marked traces of historically old Niger-Congo features, and sociolinguistic reasons for the rapid decline in number of speakers.

The Ega initiative is designed as part of a long-term cooperation and is currently structured in 3 phases:

• Preliminary investigation by Ahoua and Dago (1997), and Ahoua and Connell (1998), partly taking up work by Rémy Bole Richard in the 1980s.
• DOBES Pilot Phase project "Ega: a documentation model for an endangered Ivorian language" (2000-2001).
• Continuing fieldwork and documentation within the framework of the Cooperation Agreement between the Universities of Abidjan and Bielefeld (2002 - ...) in the context of research projects on computational linguistics and text technology (DAAD, DFG).

Currently the systematisation of further data types is in progress. Data will be made available on this basis in internationally compliant formats for signal and text annotation in cooperation with dedicated dissemination agencies and portals such as E-MELD.

• Ega Data Catalogue 2001 (Fieldwork March 2001; legacy data)
• The 2002 Catalogue will appear shortly (Fieldwork March 2002).

• Bruce Connell, Firmin Ahoua, Dafydd Gibbon (2002). "Illustrations of the IPA: Ega." Journal of the International Phonetic Association 32/1, 99-104.
  Partial set of recordings. Owing to circumstances beyond our control we have no access currently to our Ega language partners. We will publish a complete set as soon as possible.
• Ega phonemic transcription conventions (in standard and simplified X-SAMPA format)
  

• Contributions to the "Typology of African Prosodic Systems" (TAPS) Workshop, Bielefeld, 18-20 May 2001

• Initial wordlist in tabular format (character conversion not yet complete; 1305 entries, 240kB)
• PAX - Portable Audio Concordance System: online audio concordancer (see also Language Documentation Software and Lingware).
  

• Sketch grammar (113kB)
  

• (in preparation)
  

• Audio extracts: Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3
• Annotation files in Praat text format: Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3
• Oscillograms and pitch traces
  

• Audio file
• Main metadata
• Traduction française
• English translation
• Signal annotation in TASX XML format.
  

• Lecture, U Bielefeld, November 2002 - Feldforschung bei den Ega: empirische Grundlagen der Dokumentation einer bedrohten Sprache: HTML, PDF
• The WELD paradigm - ELSNews 11.3 Autumn 2002, p. 3-5: "Workable Efficient Language Documentation: a Report and a Vision" - HTML, PDF
• LREC 2002, Las Palmas, Gran Canaria: "Ubiquitous multilingual corpus management in computational fieldwork" PDF

• Notes on Lexicon Metadata (especially for Multimedia Documentation of Endangered Languages)

• Ega, Côte d'Ivoire: Picture Gallery
• The efficient documentation of endangered languages

• Ega: a documentation model for an endangered Ivorian language
• Assessing language endangerment in Egaland
• The Ega documentation model: Tools
• DOBES lexicon requirements

• Multilingual factors in endangerment space: Language Shift in the Ega community

• On Lexicon Macrostructures
  
• Hypermedia Lexica and Lexicon Metadata: The Metalex Model in the Modelex Project
• Chairman's report on Lexicon Macrostructures