Henning Schreiber (University of Hamburg) is the principal investigator in this project. He has worked on several linguistic research projects in the past fifteen years. He conducted field research and language documentation on the Eastern Mande languages Bisa, Southern Samo and Northen Samo in southern and northern Burkina Faso. He published a comparative phonology (and morphology) of the Niger Volta languages. In the documentation project Henning Schreiber has conducted an ethnographic survey, recorded and analysed oral traditions, the spirit possession cult and worked on sociolinguistics. Furthermore, he has developed software tools for the corpus annotation pipeline and effective annotation. He worked as well on prosody and the syntax-phonology interface and the issue of polysemy in Kyanga.

Marlene Altebockwinkel (University of Hamburg) is working in the project as the research assistant and is preparing her doctoral thesis. In the documentation project she works particularly in the field of everyday women’s life, records and annotates natural speech. Further she is responsible for gathering stimulus material of different cultural domains. She is responsible for grammatical and lexical elicitations.

The main collaborators are Musa Mohammed and Hajara Gewoce from Tungan Bage. But essential for the work of the project is the willingness of the Kyanga language community to support us with tales, narratives, songs and stories. We are thankful for their help and hospitality.

Marlene Altebockwinkel & Hajara Gewoce

Henning Schreiber & Musa Mohammed