|
The Baan Language Project
The Baan Documentation Project addresses the Baan language,
a sister of Eleme. Baan or Ogoi is a Benue-Congo
(Cross-River, Ogonoid) language spoken by fewer than 5,000
people in but one village in the Eleme Local Government Area
of Rivers State, Nigeria. Virtually no data is available on
this language to the broader academic or educational public,
but what little data is available suggests that it is rather
different than Eleme (Bond and Anderson 2005), despite the
fact that among the Eleme, this language is considered a
mere ‘dialect’ and not worthy of study in its own right.
This kind of negative local attitude to a language is
instrumental in determining its status as an endangered
language, as negative stigma associated with a particular
speech variety usually lead to its use being associated with
a lack of socio-economic power and mobility, furthering its
eroding within its own community (parents choose not to
teach their ancestral language to their children since they
believe it will cause their children problems economically).
The Living Tongues Baan
project sets out its goals as the following: to document the
basic words and structures of this virtually unknown
language and to demonstrate once and for all that it is a
separate language, thereby engendering a sense of identity
within the multi-ethnic and multilingual milieu it is
currently situated within, and further to develop a means of
maintaining this language within a non-educational context
through the establishment of a Baan Cultural Center where
elders and others interested in maintaining and promoting
Baan ethnolinguistic identity may do so without worry. This
cultural center will start by housing a video player to
watch the multi-media documentation materials, and a
trilingual talking (online) Baan-Eleme-English dictionary to
serve as a reference point for all to demonstrate
emphatically the non-identity of Baan with Eleme. |
