Maa (Maasai) Lexicography and Text Databases

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The Maa (Maasai) language is currently spoken by up to 500,000 Maasai, Samburu, and Camus people in Kenya and Tanzania. No linguistically adequate set of texts or dictionary of the language exist. The current project will produce computerized text and lexicography databases, with a comprehensive set of fields, such that a variety of dictionaries and text materials can eventually be published depending on the needs of various audiences, including linguists, anthropologists, historians, bilingual school teachers, and Maa speakers themselves. The lexicography database will include accurate information about the sound structure, morphology, and grammatical properties of each entry form; information about sentence types in which each word root can be used; and cultural and ethnographic information. Simultaneously, a separate verb database with morphological and syntactic information, already begun by the Principal Investigator, will be further elaborated, and syntactic hypotheses developed on the basis of previous work will be checked against new data. The project will incorporate extensive information from a minimum of four Maa dialects during the funding period. The first stage of the current project will focus on the variety of Maa spoken by the IlKeekonyokie section, which, geographically, is on the eastern-to-central part of the Kenyan Maasai area. The project will then expand to the IlWuasinkishu section, which lies on the western edge of the Kenyan territory. Thirdly, it will incorporate a North Maa dialect (Samburu or Camus), and then a Tanzanian variety, such as Arusa Maasai. These four varieties are chosen because of the Principal Investigator's past work on two of them and connections with native speakers, and geographic distribution from the north to south, and east to west extremes of the Maa area. In all cultures there is both basic and specialized vocabulary which describes activities, traditions, cosmology, religion, and the myriad ways of life specific to that culture. These features cannot be thoroughly understood without an understanding of the vocabulary which expresses the concepts comprising the traditions of the culture. The extensive lexicographic and text database will be valuable documents for preserving and transmitting the cultural knowledge of the Maa people, who are being impacted by rapid cultural change at the end of the 20th Century.