Jirim Voices: Documentation and Description of Jirim Language and Traditions

Language	Jirim
Depositor	Olga Olina
Affiliation	Humboldt University of Berlin
Location	Nigeria
Collection ID	0769
Grant ID	IGS1020
Funding Body	ELDP
Collection Status	Collection online
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/80982f29-62b6-4fa2-9d43-62c0e7b323b3

 

Summary of the collection

This collection documents the language and traditions of the Jirim people in Taraba State, central-eastern Nigeria. It comprises nearly 40 hours of video recordings made during two periods of fieldwork: an initial self-funded stay in June–July 2023 and a longer ELDP-supported field trip from February to May 2025. The recordings capture a wide range of traditional and everyday practices, including fishing, farming, cooking, oral history, the crafting of traditional items and a celebration of the Semsim (warrior) festival. The collection consists of eight hours of translation into English, approximately three and a half hours of IPA transcriptions and thirty minutes of glossings. All materials were prepared in close collaboration with Jirim speakers. As the project is still ongoing (until Oct 2027), the collection will be regularly updated and enriched with more materials.

Group represented

The Jirim people live in the central-eastern part of Taraba State, in villages across Bali and Gashaka Local Government Areas. Oral histories describe a relatively recent migration from the north, a place called Tongo in Cameroon, through parts of Adamawa and onwards to their present locations in Taraba. According to community accounts, internal conflict or civil unrest within the group may have triggered this movement.
Taraba State is extremely linguistically diverse, with more than seventy languages spoken in the region. Jirim villages are rarely ethnically homogeneous: people from other groups often settle in Jirim areas in search of farmland. As a result, most Jirim speakers are multilingual. Commonly spoken languages include Hausa, Naija, Fulfulde, Jibu and Ndola. Some elderly speakers living in remote settlements remain monolingual in Jirim. Intermarriage occurs, particularly with Jibu and Ndola communities. This usually involves a Jirim man taking a wife from another group, though the reverse also happens.
Farming is the main occupation of Jirim, while fishing (October–January) and hunting (January–March) provide important seasonal supplements before planting begins again in April. The staple crop is guinea corn, which is used to prepare porridge, beer, and tuwo. Jirim frequently say that “guinea corn is the king”. While guinea corn remains central, maize has recently gained popularity—likely introduced through Hausa influence. Other traditional crops include yam and gbaa, the latter valued as an early crop harvested in July. For commercial purposes, Jirim farmers also grow benniseed, soybeans, and sugar cane, which are sold in local markets.
Religious practices vary by location. In more urbanised or accessible villages, many people have converted to Christianity or Islam, and traditional religion is less frequently practised. In more remote settlements, traditional beliefs remain stronger. Some converts still participate in certain traditional ceremonies, though often discreetly. Gandole was a Christian missionary centre in the 1990s (?) and is now predominantly Christian. Neighbouring Kwagiri is mostly Muslim, while Kobaje, close to Gandole, was until recently inhabited solely by followers of traditional religion.
Initiation practices still exist but are rarely discussed openly. Accounts mention disciplinary measures—including beating—to remove fear, followed by a seven-day period of seclusion during which the newly initiated stay together away from the rest of the community. Those undergoing initiation leave the village during the rituals and are forbidden to share any information with non-initiated persons.
The Jirim have at least three important traditional festivals. Yigswane, the guinea corn festival, is considered the major annual celebration, marking the harvest season. When crops were weak in the past, villagers performed rituals involving the transplantation of a weak plant to a special location in the village, accompanied by dances and ceremonies. Semsim, the warrior festival, commemorates battles fought by ancestors. It had not been celebrated for some time until March 2025 when it was organised within this project for the purpose of documentation. Sifvi is the annual fishing festival taking place at the end of the rainy season. Before anyone else may fish, elders visit the Taraba river where they perform a ritual and place offerings—chicken, guinea corn blossom, locust bean leaves, and the largest fish caught—to Zuwi. Only after this may they and the rest of the community begin fishing, eating, and celebrating.
Traditional leadership structures have changed considerably. Formerly, the community was led by a Gang (king), who appointed several Mengwas (community chiefs) to assist him. The last king, Gang Saidu Turaki, passed away in January 2024 after having been relieved of his duties some time earlier. Today, political and governmental structures have replaced much of the traditional system. Villages are governed by Hakimi and Jauro, titles originating from Hausa administrative models. Political authorities now play a significant role in appointing or suspending chiefs, reflecting a shift away from customary leadership.
Also traditional crafts are changing as market-bought items become more accessible. Clay plates and calabash spoons that were once common are now rarely used. Certain types of calabashes remain important, especially for drinking beer (large calabashes) and porridge (smaller ones). Traditional clay water tanks are still used occasionally in beer brewing. Jirim farmers also have their own characteristic hoe and other distinct blacksmithing tools.

 

Collection contents

The collection currently consists of 36 hours of video recordings. The largest portion is naturalistic material (almost 24 hours), filmed during everyday activities in the village. This is complemented by 6 hours of festival recordings, 5 hours of elicitation sessions, and around 1.5 hours of dances and songs. Processing of these recordings is ongoing. At present, the collection includes 8 hours of English translations, available in 21 subtitle files, as well as 3 hours of IPA transcription, produced partly by the depositor and partly by trained native speakers. Transcription in a practical orthography will be added soon. In addition, 27 minutes have been glossed, although the grammatical analysis is still at an early stage. The lexical database currently contains 955 entries, including the lemma, English translation, part of speech, notes on Hausa loanwords, and dialect labels for Gangumi and Garba Chede. Hausa translations are being added. The database also includes a Leipzig–Jakarta list of 100 items, supplemented with personal pronouns. The collection further contains 137 photographs documenting people, geographical locations and material culture.

 

Language information

Jirim is an endangered and previously undocumented language spoken by an estimated 5,000–10,000 people in Taraba State, central-eastern Nigeria. Prior to this project, the only available sources on Jirim were two publications with short wordlists (Migoed 1925; Meek 1931), which also include information on geographical locations, names of Jirim clans, burial customs, matrilocal inheritance practices, and neighbouring groups.
Based on this limited lexical data, Greenberg (1963) classified Jirim as part of Adamawa Group 3, a genealogical grouping that is no longer accepted. Lexical data collected within this project, including items from the Leipzig–Jakarta list, show that Jirim shares a substantial portion of its basic vocabulary with other Niger-Congo languages. A more recent proposal by Blench (n.d.), known as the North Bantoid hypothesis, places Jirim together with other Dakoid languages, as well as Mambiloid and Tikar, in a single group characterised by residual suffixes that may represent historically productive noun-class markers.
This classification remains uncertain, partly because no other Dakoid language has yet been described in detail (Güldemann 2018), though a dictionary of the closely related Chamba Daka (Boyd & Sa’ad 2010) is available. Jirim also displays several areal features typical of languages of the Macro-Sudan Belt, including nasalised vowels, implosive and labio-velar consonants, and a three-level tone system.

 

Special characteristics

Among special features, the Jirim documentation project stands out for its collaborative structure, its continuous remote workflow, and its documentation methods.
The project is built on close and continuous collaboration with Jirim speakers, who are involved in all stages of the work—from planning and recording to translation and transcription. Through workshops, team members have been trained to handle recording equipment, create backups, work with ELAN, and read and write the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). We are currently collaborating on the development of a practical community orthography. The team includes several young Jirim speakers with strong computer skills, which enables active participation in digital tasks and shared control over the documentation process.
Another important aspect of the project is the way we work together remotely throughout the year. A key role in the project is played by Obidah Amos, who lives in Jalingo, where stable access to electricity and the internet allows him to coordinate communication between the depositor and the wider team throughout the year. This means that work does not stop between field trips: several people contribute simultaneously, questions—especially grammatical ones—can be resolved immediately, and recordings can be processed quickly. Team communication takes place through a dedicated WhatsApp group. Among other activities, Obidah regularly posts a “Jirim word of the day” with a picture and audio. These items are being collected and will be incorporated into the FLEx database.
A further special characteristic of the project concerns its documentation methods, both for naturalistic data and elicitation. For naturalistic recordings, the project follows a spontaneous, opportunity-based approach rather than the traditional appointment-based model. Fieldwork days are spent walking through the village from sunrise to dusk, observing ongoing activities. When I notice an activity that could be documented, I ask for permission to film, and so far people have been willing to take part. This approach allows for recordings in natural, unstaged environments, with people simply carrying out their daily work. (It is, however, only possible during the dry season, when villagers are not occupied with farming.)

I follow the following workflow in order to produce longer and more comprehensive videos:

1. Demonstration – filming the activity as the person performs it.
2. Explanation – the speaker gives a monologue explaining what they are doing.
3.  Interview – a native-speaking team member asks follow-up questions about the activity.
4.  Personal information – personal questions, e.g., about when and how the person learned the skill, and whether older generations practised it in the same way.
5.  Informed consent – once the recording is complete, participants decide whether they agree to its publication and use within the project.

For elicitation, the project uses what I call self-elicitation. Questions are prepared in advance and explained to the consultant, who then records the elicited material independently. All of this is done in Jirim only, without switching between English and Jirim. This reduces the influence of English on syntactic structures, avoids translations, and significantly speeds up the process.

 

Collection history

This collection was created during two periods of fieldwork. The first field trip was self-funded and took place in June–July 2023. The focus during this initial visit was on getting first contact, permissions from the traditional leaders to do documentation and assembling a team. The materials collected include primarily lexical elicitation conducted with Moses Adamu from Garba Chede in Bali LGA, a highly urbanised settlement at the main road. Some naturalistic recordings were made with Rebecca Lamba from Gangumi in Gashaka LGA. During this trip, I visited Gangumi and recorded an oral history account by the retired king Saidu Turaki who died half a year later. I also started collaborating with two younger speakers of Jirim Obidah Amos and Innocent Zechariah. Workshops were held on the use of recording equipment, backup procedures, ELAN, and the basics of translation and trascription.
The second field trip was carried out from February to May 2025 and was funded by ELDP as part of an Individual Graduate Scholarship for a three-year PhD project. Most of the materials in this collection were recorded during this period. Work was concentrated mainly in Gangumi and Kufai, and the emphasis shifted toward naturalistic recordings across a wide range of daily activities. The Semsim warrior festival was documented on 24 March 2025, its first celebration in many years. Further training sessions were held with community members, and cooperation expanded to include a broad range of villagers.

 

References

Boyd, R., & Sa’ad, I. (2010). A Chamba-English dictionary. Lagos: Malthouse Press.

Blench, R. (n.d.). The North Bantoid hypothesis.

Greenberg, J. H. (1963). The languages of Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University.

Güldemann, T. (2018). Historical linguistics and genealogical language classification in Africa.
In T. Güldemann (Ed.), The languages and linguistics of Africa. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Hammarström, H., Forkel, R., Haspelmath, M., & Bank, S. (2025). Glottolog 5.2. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/diri1253

Idiatov, D. (2022). AdaGram lexical questionnaire (Version 2022-10-09). Villejuif: CNRS.

Meek, C. K. (1931). Tribal studies in Northern Nigeria (Vol. 2). London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.

Migeod, F. W. H. (1925). Through British Cameroons. London: Heath Cranton.

 

Acknowledgement and citation

Jirim community: I am deeply grateful to the Jirim community for their warm welcome, generosity, and willingness to share their knowledge, skills and time.
Team Jirim: My sincere thanks go to all members of the documentation team, whose dedication and hard work shape every part of this project.
Jakob Lesage: I would also like to acknowledge Jakob Lesage, who provided initial data, encouragement, and support in many practical and linguistic matters.

To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Olina, Olga. 2024. Jirim Voices: Documentation and Description of Jirim Language and Traditions. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/80408398-88f0-4e16-b156-18fa854abeaf. Accessed on [insert date here].