Finding Nimo

Earlier this year I was able to work alongside the sociolinguistic survey team to find out more about the language situation in my corner of Gulf Province. What this means in lay terms is that I was able to travel* about with people good at finding out about how languages are the same or different, and how people perceive their languages, so that we can better plan how to work with the people around me.

One part of language survey is getting wordlists. We would do this by sitting with people in the village, discussing the list and then recording their responses. The survey team would transcribe this using IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet). Before transcription we would always have to explain to people that we were using a special alphabet, otherwise they would correct us for using the wrong spelling for their normal alphabet. Sometimes it was good to also write down their suggestion, as it gave us insight into how they understood their language.

 Collecting word lists in Ipiko with the survey team. (H. Schulz)

How people understand their language is an important part of survey, and in each place we visited we would try to understand this. Sometimes we did this through large group activities, where we got people to write labels for villages and tribes, grouping them together as same or different. Other times we would learn from a small group discussion of how they saw themselves and who they communicated with in the region.

The question ‘Who are you?’ is a philosophers playground, but it was a question we would ask to try and understand how they defined and named their language, clan, tribe and identity. We often collected overlapping or conflicting definitions as different people saw things different ways. Our job was to listen and record this information and to collate it later.

Once our travels and data collection were done, the survey team writes up an extensive report. This report compares the wordlists for mutual intelligibility as well as listing and discussing the social information we found out. It is a report that then informs the practicalities of work decisions as we try to meet the linguistic, translation and literacy needs of the region.

Travelling between language areas as we did our work had its moments. One of these was the confusing word ‘ni’. It occurred in all three linguistic areas we worked in, and in each place it was a pronoun, but in each place a different pronoun. In one area it meant ‘we’, in another it meant ‘you(sg)’ and in a third it meant ‘them’. Apparently it is also a Swedish pronoun!

An amusing thing we uncovered in my language was that there are two meanings of the word ‘nimo’, which is said like ‘Nemo’ from the movie. The first meaning of ‘nimo’ is ‘we’ and the second is ‘lice’. This means that ‘finding nimo’ is either the search for ourselves, or a hunt for lice. Ever since then when I see a mother picking through her child’s hair for lice, I smile and think ‘Finding Nimo!’

 Finding nimo (H. Schulz)

*travel: as readers of my blog would know, travel is a major challenge for me in Gulf Province. This survey trip was done in partnership with the YWAM medical ship. We were based on the ship and each day as the YWAM health care teams went out to villages, we would go with and collect words and information. While they provided glasses, immunisations and health checks, we would sit nearby and collect language data. Well, we couldn’t sit too close by, as babies receiving immunisations tend to yell a lot and we had to be out of earshot for the sake of our recordings! Thanks YWAM for making this trip possible.