Cross-listed with Linguistics and Anthropology.

At a time when minority languages are dwindling and becoming extinct, language documentation is more important than ever. This course has two main pedagogical goals, related to the documentation of understudied languages. The first goal is to train students on the methods of eliciting and evaluating data to construct a detailed linguistic description and analysis of an unknown language, essentially from scratch, by working with a native speaker of the language. One important aspect of this goal is training students in the practice of professional writing in linguistics. The second goal is for students to discover specific details of the structure of the language under investigation. This semester we will likely work with a speaker of a Bantu language spoken in western Kenya.