A pilot study on the documentation of the Lokoya language
| Language | Lokoya (ISO639-3:lky), |
| Depositor | Jonathan Moodie |
| Affiliation | University of Melbourne |
| Location | Kenya |
| Collection ID | 0627 |
| Grant ID | SG0569 |
| Funding Body | |
| Collection Status | Forthcoming |
| Landing Page Handle | http://hdl.handle.net/2196/d8c082df-b2d1-4f11-a204-b43d49a2d50e |
Summary of the collection
The Lokoya language is spoken by around 12,000 people in South Sudan and is considered threatened due to language shift and population displacement. Very little documentation has been carried out on this language. This project will undertake initial documentation work with speakers living in Melbourne and in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya and will record a range of conversations, traditional stories, and songs. It will investigate the current status of the language and examine the feasibility of carrying out a major documentation project for the language.
Group represented
The Lokoya speakers in this collection come from two communities. One is a group of Lokoya speakers who have migrated to Melbourne, Australia. The second group are Lokoya speakers living in the Kakuma refugee camp in Northern Kenya.
Language information
The speakers of Lokoya live in the province of Eastern Equatoria in South Sudan (as well as in refugee camps in Kenya and Uganda). It is classified as follows: Nilo-Saharan, Eastern Sudanic, Nilotic, Eastern Nilotic, Lotuxo-Teso, Lotuxo, Lokoya. Ethnologue lists the number of speakers as 12,000.
Collection contents
The collection will comprise audio-visual and audio recordings. These will include a range of culturally important stories and songs; conversations and discussions; and descriptions of traditional and everyday activities; together with the associated metadata. I plan to record 24 hours of video and 62 hours of audio. A subset of these recordings (40%) will be transcribed and translated. A further subset (15% of total) will be morphologically segmented and glossed.
Acknowledgement and citation
To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Moodie, Jonathan. 2020. A pilot study on the documentation of the Lokoya language, an eastern Nilotic language of South Sudan: an archive of linguistic and cultural material from the Lokoya language. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/996af15f-6f7f-43c5-b294-55fc265c128d. Accessed on [insert date here].
