Tag Archives: Dogon languages

Creating a CLDF Wordlist from Heath et al.’s Dogon Comparative Wordlist

The Dogon and Bangime Linguistics project (https://dogonlanguages.org) offers a large comparative spreadsheet in which translational equivalents for a huge number of concepts are translated into various Dogon languages.  Due to its enormous size, no attempts have been made so far to integrate the spreadsheet with the lexical resources that were compiled as part of the CLDF initiative in order to populate the Lexibank repository. Here, we report a first attempt to circumvent the problems resulting from the size of the spreadsheet by convert not all but parts of the spreadsheet to CLDF Wordlist standards, which allows us to integrate parts of the data with other resources in Lexibank.

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The Small Bang

The Small Bang represents a recently begun ERC-funded project dedicated to discovering the origins of the Bangime language and Bangande people. The language and its speakers are of particular interest to West African research as Bangime is one of the only isolates spoken in the region and the ancestors of the Bangande are also unknown. Using the latest computer-assisted technologies, the Bang team is amassing linguistic and genetic data and comparing them with a hitherto unexplored set of languages and peoples in search of a hidden history. Preliminary hypotheses suggest geographic isolation that has led to a bottleneck of at least 9,000 years. The question as to from whom the people and their language originated remains open.

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