Published!

Impeccable timing @JohnBenjaminsPublishingCompany – this arrived on my birthday! Well done to the research team, advisors, experiment administrators, cartographers, proof-readers, editors and and everyone else who was involved in this six year project.

This book presents the results of a series of literacy experiments in ten Niger-Congo languages, representing four language families and spanning five countries. It investigates the research question, ”To what extent does full tone marking contribute to oral reading fluency, comprehension and writing accuracy, and does that contribution vary from language to language?”. One of the main findings is that the ethno-literacy profile of the language community and the social profile of the individual are stronger predictors of reading and writing performance than are the linguistic and orthographic profiles of the language. Our data also suggests that full tone marking may be more beneficial for less educated readers and those with less experience of L1 literacy. The book will bring practical help to linguists and literacy specialists in Africa and beyond who are helping to develop orthographies for tone languages. It will also be of interest to cognitive psychologists exploring the reading process, and researchers investigating writing systems.

Nateni contour tones

Just got back from Tanguieta (Benin) where I was staying with my good friends Carl and Ursula,  and researching the best way of writing contour tones in Nateni with Esaïe, one of the Bible translators. After 25 years work, the New Testament is now complete and will be dedicated later this year. Spot the African grey parrot in the background.

Dan orthography testing

End of week ten, and the training phase is over. Altogether we’ve trained 68 volunteers in four different versions of the orthography.

The daily visit to the pool is paying off in more ways than one. Yesterday I dived in and found a 5000 cfa note (£6.50) on the bottom.

Dan orthography testing

End of week 9. Yesterday morning we recorded 13 people reading versions three and four of the orthography. Then I slept for the entire afternoon. This research project is a marathon!

Dan orthography testing

End of week 8. We’re at that point in the marathon when it already feels like we’ve been here for ever, but still have a long way to go. Only swam twice this week, by Wednesday the water was lurid green.

Dan orthography testing

End of week four. The last couple of weeks we’ve been busy teacher training. Emmanuel and Josephine are doing an amazing job juggling two spelling systems, one in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Unfortunately, we lost 3 of the 8 candidates on the way, but on Friday we were still able to recruit two of them, Odile and Abednego, to help us with the teaching next week. If all goes according to plan, 30 volunteers should turn up 8am Monday morning.

Roadworks

The road through our village has several very steep parts which get eroded during the rainy season, leaving nothing but ruts and sharp rocks. Passengers get thrown about in the back of the car, and it plays havoc with tyres and suspension rods.

So it’s become something of an annual tradition, between Christmas and New Year, for the entire village to descend on the road to repair it.

I joined 100 other people early this morning. The younger men dig earth and stones out of the nearby fields . The women and children transport the loads on their heads to the road. The older men fill in the holes to make the road smooth again.

Then we all go back to my place for millet beer and grilled sesame seeds.

Another day of hard work, interdependence and laughter in an African village.

Full notebooks

The workshop participants always return home with their exercise books crammed full of notes which they took during the lectures.

Tone on verbs

In most African languages, tone plays an important role in verb conjugations (e.g. ‘you eat’ vs ‘he eats’; ‘you eat’ vs ‘you ate’; ‘you ate’ vs ‘you didn’t eat’ etc). That’s why the Yaoundé workshop participants spent a lot of time writing down lists of verbs in various tenses, and discovering for themselves the patterns in their own languages. That painstaking work lays the foundation for deciding whether and how to include tone in the writing system.

Text analysis

Analyzing a text in a Central African language (can’t remember which one – can anybody help?). The words circled in red are ones which have two or more meanings depending which tones you pronounce them with.