The Bukusu Language

I took Linguistics 300, Field Methods, in the Spring of 2002. In this class, we learned how to describe and analyze a language that we knew nothing about. Our native speaker for the semester was Aggrey Wasike, a native speaker of Bukusu, a language of Western Kenya which is spoken by about half a million people, but did not have a written form until very recently. This language has hardly been studied at all, so it is very exciting to learn about it.

You can learn a little bit more about Bukusu from Ethnologue, but as I said there's not a lot of information on the language.

Data and Analysis of Bukusu

NOTE: All the audio files on this page are in FLAC format. The reason I use FLAC is because the files take up less space than WAV files, but the compression is lossless.

• Thursday January 31, 2002: First bi-weekly report. This report has the transcriptions of the glosses of some basic words, and a rough phoneme inventory of the language.
• Thursday February 14, 2002: Second bi-weekly report. This report has sample sentences and some data on the verbal morphology of Bukusu.
• Tuesday February 19, 2002: Wasike tells us a story in Bukusu (11M FLAC audio file), and translates it into English for us (13M FLAC audio file, text transcription). It's a story about a squirrel and a leopard, and it's a bit creepy, but entertaining as well. Read the English text!
• Thursday February 20, 2002: Wasike records the complete verb conjugations of `to swim' and `to buy' with me and another student (12M FLAC audio file). This was done in the sound-proof booth with a digital audio tape, so it is a very high quality recording.
• Monday March 4, 2002: First field report. This report has lots of data and analysis. After handing it in, we all received a copy of a 300-page disseration done at Ohio State in 2000 by Nasiombe Mutonyi. Basically, we picked up this dissertation, and started reading it ... it turns out a lot of of theories about Bukusu were correct, but a lot are wrong as well. Not surprising since we had very little data so far ...
• Monday March 4, 2002: Third bi-weekly writeup. This one has lots and lots and lots of syntactic and morphological data, as well as some cultural information about common names for children in Bukusu culture, and forms of address.
• Tuesday March 26, 2002: Well, apparently while I was lazing around on Spring Break, Wasike and the professors were hard at work producing a phonetic transcription of the "Squirrel and Leopard" story in Bukusu (Word file). Cool!
• Friday April 12, 2002: I got some interesting data on interrogatives, negated embedded clauses, and so forth, in my one-on-one session with Wasike (Word file).
• Thursday April 25, 2002: The draft of my final paper proposal is done.
• May 15, 2002: Here is my final paper (Word file). You will need the "Arial Unicode MS" font in order to see all the phonetic characters correctly. I refined the topic greatly, at Professor Collins suggestion, and the final title is "Noun Class Agreement in Bukusu Locative Noun Phrases."