This project is a study of tone in Medumba, an Eastern Grassfields Bantu language spoken in Western Cameroon. Some description and analysis of Medumba was carried out in the 1970s, and it quickly became apparent that the tone system of the language poses significant challenges and differs in important ways from the Bantu languages found in surrounding areas. This language and its close relatives were the basis for the theoretical construct of "floating tone" and its critical role in understanding downstep. Reasoning about this phenomenon was closely linked to facts about the noun class system, which has become segmentally attenuated, resulting in very complex patterns of tone realization in a variety of constructions. This research aims to resolve a complex web of questions concerning tone, noun class, and largely undescribed verbal tone patterns. The research consists of one month of field work in Cameroon by four graduate student fieldworkers. It will provide an updated description of the language, along with answers to specific questions about the realization of tone in a variety of contexts. These data will then be used to decide between competing accounts of the tone system.
The significance of this project lies in several areas. First, it will substantially increase what is known to the linguistic sciences about Medumba, a language that exemplifies one particularly complex and theoretically important type of tonal system. Scholarly work on the typology of tone is still developing and the results of this project will contribute to these efforts. Second, the project will provide training for four graduate students, all of whom are committed to becoming theoretically-informed linguistic fieldwork experts. As more languages become extinct, pressure grows on the linguistic sciences to fully understand the range of grammatical diversity in the remaining languages. As the field intensifies its efforts to describe and document these remaining languages, it is imperative to train younger scientists to conduct such work using best practices. The students will attend an international summer school on linguistic fieldwork and African tone systems prior to their visit to Cameroon. Finally, they will begin a partnership with a Cameroonian applied linguistic organization, which will contribute to efforts to sustain the language as bilingualism of colonial languages continues to encroach. One purpose of the partnership will be to develop written materials in Medumba, including a dictionary. This training and experience is co-funded by the Africa, Near East, and South Asia division in NSF's Office of International Science and Engineering. Combined with further mentoring by five senior linguists, it will prepare these young scientists to contribute to the infrastructure of the field in one of its most pressing domains: the description and documentation of under-described languages.
Goals of the project: (a) to provide targeted training for graduate students in language documentation; (b) to document the grammar of Medumba, a Grassfields Bantoid language of Cameroon, West Africa; (c) to collaborate with CEPOM, an NGO in Cameroon that is devoted to the maintenance of Medumba. Rationale: It is well documented that the world’s languages are becoming extinct at a rapid rate. This has scientific consequences: Linguistics investigates language as a complex system that changes across time. The study of language acquisition, structure, and change all require that linguists use data from a variety of languages. Each language studied provides deeper insight. The imminent loss of most of the world’s languages will have negative consequences for the science of linguistics, so the field needs to increase documentation of disappearing languages. But who will carry out this work? Documentation training must begin early in graduate study. Fieldwork, often in underresourced regions, is complex. Also complex is the delicate matter of working with community-based efforts to sustain threatened languages in the face of colonial languages. And simply starting from scratch, going to an area where a language is spoken, is expensive and slow. Design: Our project was designed to see if we could both provide excellent training for a relatively large number of graduate students, and complete language documentation work on a typologically important language. The broader impacts would be in the training of graduate students as field linguists, in the hopes that they would continue in the activity of language documentation. Intellectual merit goals would involve description of Medumba, a language of Cameroon that is known to have one of the most complex tonal systems in the world. One of the leading Africanist linguists briefly studied this language four decades ago, thus we could address the issue of language change in the context of colonial and postcolonial language influences of French and English. Finally, we would engage in cross-national collaboration with a Cameroonian NGO Our project design leveraged a feature of linguistics in US universities: they offer courses in linguistic field methods, working with native speaker consultants of unfamiliar languages. But in the course of one semester, students are able to document very little. In 2009 at Boston University, the PI taught Linguistic Field Methods working with a speaker of Medumba who was also a PhD student at BU. A second year of Medumba study gave students who had worked on the language in 2009 a chance to go deeper. The NSF grant to do fieldwork in Cameroon would support work with more speakers in the current context. The Field Methods consultant would serve as the guide in setting up conditions for a safe and productive trip. Outcomes: The first year, four MA students who had studied Medumba in Boston attended an international workshop on methods of language documentation in the Netherlands, then traveled to Cameroon for a month, interviewing over 15 speakers on a variety of topics. The following academic year, they analyzed data, wrote and presented papers on topics concerning the tone system and changes in the language since previous work in 1970. In the summer of 2011, when most of the grant funds had been expended, additional sources of funding supported another trip to Cameroon (not included in the original proposal), with two new students and one returning student. The new team worked with over twenty speakers, and wrote and presented three papers at an international conference. We involved two more graduate students at BU who had not conducted fieldwork but who worked on the language in Boston. Both teams also worked with CEPOM, an NGO based in Bangangte, Cameroon. CEPOM’s goal is to sustain and develop knowledge of Medumba in the face of colonial language encroachment, and continue to work with them on their goal of creating Medumba resources. The broader impact outcomes of the project include field-based training of six graduate students. Of the first team, three went on to doctoral study in linguistics at excellent programs. Two were invited to take part in the first Workshop on Sociolinguistic Documentation in Sub-Saharan Africa, held in conjunction with the 7th World Congress of African Linguistics. One student took on the role of team leader in the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (which is now ELCat, a project co-funded by Google), at the Linguist List organization at Eastern Michigan University. We can say that the support of NSF for this project resulted in numerous outcomes, including five published papers, five MA theses, a large corpus of digitized data that is currently being readied for sharing with our CEPOM collaborators and other linguists interested in the language, and outstanding fieldwork experience for six graduate students in linguistics, who we hope will continue this work to benefit the science of linguistics.
