A worldwide documentation of musical surrogate languages
Blaise Tahoulan plays the ayogbon musical style. Photo by Laura Mcpherson 2022. Click on image to access collection.
| Language | Fon, Maxi, Gun, Saxwe, Igbo, Akan, Northern Toussian, Hmong Daw |
| Depositor | Laura McPherson |
| Affiliation | Dartmouth College |
| Location | Benin, Nigeria, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Laos |
| Collection ID | 0748 |
| Grant ID | BCS-1943896 |
| Funding Body | National Science Foundation |
| Collection Status | Collection online |
| Landing Page Handle | http://hdl.handle.net/2196/43326a16-63e7-4c53-90ea-ae70157d0d7c |
Podcast
Summary of the collection
This deposit is the first of its kind to bring together recordings and transcriptions of musical surrogate languages around the world. It is the result of collaboration with linguists, musicians, and community members working together with the goal of documenting these unique musico-linguistic traditions. The work is supported by an NSF CAREER grant “Phonetic and phonological aspects of musical surrogate languages” beginning in 2020. The audio, video, and transcribed materials found here are of broad interdisciplinary interest, relevant to members of the communities, linguists, musicologists, folklorists, and anthropologists, among others.
Group represented
This collection represents multiple groups around the world who practice forms of musical surrogate languages. Each group is diverse in its languages, musical culture, and communicative niches for speech surrogacy.
Language information
This deposit contains materials from multiple linguistic communities. Further information can be found in the metadata for individual sessions.
Acknowledgement and citation
Users of any part of the collection should acknowledge Laura McPherson as the principal investigator; please refer to metadata for individual sessions for other researchers, musicians, and collaborators, who should also be acknowledged by name. This work is funded by a US National Science Foundation CAREER grant BCS-1943896.
To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
McPherson, Laura. 2023. A worldwide documentation of musical surrogate languages. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/e54c604a-7235-4e76-aaef-1265571d9ef6. Accessed on [insert date here].
