The language of the Cherangany - living language, culture and contact in a colonial construct

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Angelika Mietzner
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: from 2011 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 192037699

The aim of the project is to specify the Grammar of Cherangany in various fields with particular consideration of culture, perception and communication. In the ongoing project the description of Cherangany is combined with a synchronic and diachronic study of the other Marakwet languages, Endo, Kiptani and Almoo.In the last two years, the applicant gained new insights into the wide range of polysemies in the morphology, as well as into the fascinating culture-specific lexicon. Moreover, the investigations provide evidence of the political construct Marakwet which cannot be sufficiently described without considering the language ideology and areal aspects.Belonging to the Kalenjin languages which are part of Southern Nilotic, the Marakwet language group is a colonial ethnolinguistic construct. It does not display a homogenous language group but rather consists of at least two divergent groups (Rottland 1982, Kipkorir 1985, Mietzner 2009).Therefore in the course of this project the colonial construct Marakwet is linguistically deconstructed in a comparative approach to grammar, lexicon, semantics and typology.Provided that the project is extended, certain fields of the language will be described that have only marginally been considered before. In this respect it is of great advantage that the applicant has a good knowledge of sociology and that an assistant is integrated into the project who is doing his PhD in social studies.Lüpke und Storch (2013) point out that speakers of a language act and react due to the contact they have and due to the environment they live in. The comparative study of the Marakwet languages raise the question of language contact and contact areas. As a result of these studies that were undertaken on the various Marakwet languages, Endo, Cherangany, Almoo and Kiptani, further comparative studies in the field of language ideology and areality will be conducted. These new aspects require that new methodological and theoretical perspectives will be taken into account, although the comparison of the languages will continue to represent the focus of the project.If this application is approved, the description of the Cherangany language will develop into a description of the Cherangany language embedded in its sociolinguistic context.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants