Ega Project Goals and Description

Page Index

• Introduction
• Ega and its speech community
• Follow the path of the Ega data

Introduction

The Ega initiative aims to develop a model for the computational language documentation of an endangered language, involving design and performance of fieldwork & documentation on the forms & functions of an endangered language, based on workable, efficient computational linguistic & phonetic methods (see article on the WELD paradigm), and including the development of appropriate software: fieldwork, description and documentation support tools.

Ega and its speech community

The focus is on Ega, an endangered language isolate so far assigned to the Kwa family and surrounded by a language of the Kru family (Dida), in the Ivory Coast, West Africa.

The language is called "Ega" by most speakers and by scientists, and "Diès" by Dida speakers and some Ega speakers. Ega is the most western of the Kwa languages, the only Kwa language west of the Bandama River, and an isolate in the Nyo cluster.

The average age of fluent speakers is high, and the degree of intermingling (intermarriage and bidirectional migration) with the enclaving Dida speaking population is also high. In school, children speak French in the classroom and, typically, a regional vehicular language such as Dioula (Jula) with their schoolfriends, which weakens intergeneration transmission of the language.

Follow the path of the Ega data

1. Get Started: Summary of the Ega conversion
2. Build a Lexicon: Lexicons page (Classroom)
3. Encode Characters: Unicode pages (Classroom)
4. Create an IGT: IGT pages (Classroom)
5. Convert Audio Data: Audio pages (Classroom)
6. Convert Video Data: Video pages (Classroom)
7. Utilize an Ontology: Ontology pages (Classroom)

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