Becky Everson's fieldwork corpus on Shekgalagadi is live!

Published
October 4, 2023
The corpus for Becky Everson's fieldwork on Shekgalagadi is live on ELAR's website! It contains 32 hours of video and audio, with 4 hours transcribed in Shekgalagadi orthography and English, and 75 minutes annotated. It also contains 550 photos and a work-in-progress Shekgalagadi-Setswana-English dictionary with over 500 entries. Use the links below to check it out!
 
Shekgalagadi (ISO-639-3 xkv, Glottolog 1887-xkv) is a minority language spoken by approximately 78,000 speakers in Botswana (Eberhard et al. 2022). It exhibits a large amount of regional variety and has a wide geographical distribution of speakers (Lukusa and Monaka 2008, Eberhard et al. 2022). The variety that is seemingly the most studied is Shengologa (Lukusa and Monaka 2008, Monaka 2017, Crane 2009). Tjhauba is an understudied and under-represented variety of Shekgalagadi spoken in the Okavango Delta region, approximately 700km from the central area in which Shengologa is spoken (Lukusa and Monaka 2008). Tjhauba is phonologically and lexically distinct from other Shekgalagadi varieties and exhibits influence from other Bantu and San languages spoken in the region, such as Thimbukushu, Shiyeyi, and ||Ani (per. comm. Dr. Lee Pratchett and Dr. Anderson Chebanne). The only existing documentation of this variety is a short morphological and phonetic description from a project conducted in 2019 (Gunnink 2022). This documentary project represents the first public corpus of Shekgalagadi speech events. In addition to diverse speech genres and topics, it also preserves traditions that elders predict will disappear with their generation, such as the ngwale ritual (per. comm. Magogo and Boipheto Mokgosi). This corpus contains 32 hours of video and audio, with 2 hours transcribed in English and Shekgalagadi orthography, and 1 hour annotated. It also contains 550 photos and a work-in-progress Shekgalagadi-English-Setswana dictionary.