Capturing Nigerian Arabic language and culture in words and texts

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jonathan Owens
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 315258557

To an already existing suite of linguistic documentation and theoretical treatments, sociolinguistic, dialectological, semantic, discourse, two further databases will be added to the description of Arabic in Northeast Nigeria (popularly known by the exonym Shuwa Arabic). One is a final preparation and presentation of oral texts (audio and phonetic transcription), which will bring the total corpus of online available material to some 400,000 words, nearly 40% of which will have been translated and annotated for linguistic and cultural background. To this corpus will be added an open-source concordizing tool allowing rapid search of the corpus. The other is the preparation of a dictionary, based in part on the stems from the text corpus, in part on material the applicant has gathered and partly systematized in many years of research on this Arabic dialect, and in part on existing lexica of Nigerian Arabic. The dictionary will contain more than 10,000 lemmas. With these two resources Nigerian Arabic will be among the best overall documented Arabic dialects, and one of the best documented African languages, much of the documentation saved and available as a permanent, online, interactive resource.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Nigeria
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Jidda Hassan, Ph.D.