Damakawa wordlist

Language	Damakawa
Depositor	Stuart McGill
Affiliation	SOAS University of London
Location	Nigeria
Collection ID	0057
Grant ID
Funding Body
Collection Status	Collection online
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/badba17a-a9fa-45a3-bce0-504990630885

 

Summary of the collection

This collection consists of electronic wordlists collected, with considerable difficulty, from four ‘rememberers’ of Damakawa. All of the words should be considered suspect, and there seems to be a lot of contamination from the surrounding languages (especially Cicipu and Tsuva’di).

The collection also includes audio recordings of two of three elicitation sessions (in Hausa), although these are not linked to the lexicon at present. In addition, the following resources are included:

• photographs of most of the contributors
• GPS coordinates and a map showing the location of Damakawa
• complete set of Toolbox files for the project

 

Group represented

Damakawa

 

Language information

Damakawa is (2008) a moribund West Kainji language spoken in two or three villages between Dirindaji and Makuku in Sakaba LGA, Kebbi State, Nigeria. The Damakawa are an ethnic group of about 500-1000 people, but the language is no longer spoken. There are a handful of ‘rememberers’.

 

Special characteristics

Damakawa remained unknown to linguists until 2008. This is therefore the only record of the language (as of September 2009).

 

Acknowledgement and citation

To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:

McGill, Stuart. 2010. Damakawa wordlist. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-0001-8CDB-D. Accessed on [insert date here].