RESEARCH
Research Interests
All my research and publication is descriptive and historical comparative work on African languages. My specialty is the Chadic family of languages, spoken in Niger, northern Nigeria, northern Cameroon, and east-central Chad Republic. My concentration has been on languages of the West Branch of Chadic, which are all spoken in northern Nigeria and which include Hausa, the largest natively spoken language in sub-Saharan Africa.
Learn more about Chadic languages and my work on them.
Stimulated by teaching, speaking, and doing research on Hausa since 1965, I study African poetic metrics and music, esp. Hausa poetry and music, but also metrics in the poetry and song of West African languages in general.
Learn more about African poetic metrics and my work on them.
In 2003-2004, for personal interest, I participated in the first year Korean class at UCLA. I found Korean to be one of the most fascinating languages that I ever encountered and have continued studying it.
Learn more about my interests in Korean
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Fieldwork
Almost all the data for my research comes from fieldwork I have done at various times over the past 35 years. I have worked mainly in northern Nigeria, but also in Niger, Togo, Ghana, and Senegal. I have also spent a fair amount of time working with speakers of African languages in Los Angeles. Most of my field research has been on Chadic languages, but I have done non-trivial amounts of work on Tamazahaq (a Berber language of Niger), Kanuri (a Nilo-Saharan language of Nigeria), Fula (a West Atlantic language spoken across West Africa), Ewe (a "Kwa" language of Togo and Ghana), Avatime (a "Togo remnant" language of Ghana) and Wolof (a West Atlantic language of Senegal and Gambia). Because the Chadic languages are part of the larger Afroasiatic Phylum, I have sought to broaden my knowledge of the phylum by sitting in on classes at UCLA in Arabic, Hebrew, Tigrinya, and Ancient Egyptian.
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Current Research Projects
- Research on five Chadic languages of Yobe State, Nigeria: From December 2001 through December 2004, the National Science Foundation funded a three year grant (#BCS-0111289, Russell G. Schuh. Principal Investigator) for research on five languages of Yobe State, Nigeria: Bade, Bole, Karekare, Ngamo, Ngizim. A primary goal of the project was to develop large dictionaries, focusing not only on collecting root words, but also on documenting derivational morphology, compounding, idioms, proper names, and other information that native speakers have as part of their "lexicons" in a broad sense. In conjunction with this, the project collected literature in all the languages, again in a broad sense of "literature". The project hired educated native speakers of each of the languages to collect and analyze data from their languages. The in-country Project Coordinator was Dr. Alhaji Maina Gimba (see the next bulleted point) and involved three field trips to Nigeria for the PI as well as research projects involving students at UCLA. See a description of the Yobe Languages Research Project with samples from all the languages. Russell Schuh now has a new NSF grant (BCS-0553222, Russell G. Schuh, PI) "Lexicon, Linguistic Structure, and Verbal Arts of Chadic Languages of Northeastern Nigeria". This grant will support a continuation of the work of the previous grant, with much of the same personnel in Nigeria, but it will be expanded to include the Duwai language (a close relative of Bade and Ngizim) and, in addition to expanding the lexicons from the previousl project, will focus on assembling data with an areal perspective, looking for idioms, songs, folktale motifs, cultural material, and the like that reflect shared properites across the languages. The PI plans to travel to Nigeria in Summer 2007 and in Winter 2008-2009.
- Bole grammar, dictionary, and texts: With the support of a National Science Foundation grant (#BCS9905180, Russell G. Schuh, Principal Investigator), I from Fall 1999 through December 2000 with former UCLA student, now alumnus, Alhaji Maina Gimba, on a project which will eventually result in a detailed reference grammar, substantial dictionary, and a collection of texts documenting the Bole language, a Chadic language of the West-A Branch. We are in the process of writing the grammar. See draft chapters.
- Chadic lexical databases: As part of the projects listed above, we have assembled a substantial databases, using Filemaker Pro, of the five target languages of the Yobe Languages Research Project (Bade (two dialects), Bole, Karekare, Ngamo, Ngizim) as well as Duwai (a language close to Bade, also spoken in Yobe State), and Miya (a more distantly related Chadic language, spoken in Bauchi State). In addition to fields for headword, grammatical category (noun, verb, etc.), and English and Hausa definitions, we also have fields for sorting on a variety of phonological properties (e.g. tone pattern, syllable structure), morphological properties (e.g. reduplicative patterns, derivational affixes of various types, compound types), semantic categories, sources of loanwords, and dialect variants. This electronic lexicon for Bole has proven so valuable that I have been creating similar databases for other languages for which I have lexical data. These currently include four West Chadic-B languages: Bade (Western dialect), Bade (Gashua dialect), Duwai, and Miya. With the help of a research assistant, I am also compiling a database of Karekare, a West Chadic-A language. I am planning others. See "Lexical databases of Chadic languages" for availability of these databases and documentation.
- Comparative Chadic studies: Inspired by the projects above and the appearance of Paul Newman's definitive grammar of Hausa, The Hausa Language: An Encyclopedic Reference Grammar, (Yale University Press, 2000), I have been writing a number of papers, some potentially publishable, some speculative musings, on a variety of comparative Chadic topics. (See Downloadable papers). Likewise, through teaching historical linguistics, which involves working with Indo-European comparative work, I am made aware of how primitive is our knowledge of comparative Chadic etymology. I have begun compiling a database of Chadic roots, a long term project which I hope will become a substantial comparative Chadic dictionary within my lifetime.
- Hausar Baka: In 1996, I began involvement in a project for using video to teach Hausa at the elementary and intermediate levels. This work was supported by a grant from the US Department of Education, Richard Randell, PI. We spent about 2 months in Nigeria videtaping what resulted in about 5 hours of edited video of Hausa speakers engaged in almost entirely natural speech situations. I have continued work on this project, developing a full transcript of the videos and sets of pedagogical exercises (see the link). Though primarily a pedagogical project, this project has produced a rich source of natural spoken Hausa, to which I have referred in a number of research publications. A lexicon with references to contextual uses of all the words occurring in the videos is available, and I am working on an index of morphological and grammatical uses in context.
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Lexical databases of Chadic languages
The databases below are in FileMaker Pro 8.5, a cross-platform relational database application. The head entries and examples are all in Unicode, using the AfroRomanU font, sold by Linguists Software).
These files and paper documentation are available free of charge. The files run from 1MB to 3MB each. They are available on CD from
Russell Schuh
Department of Linguistics
UCLA
Los Angeles CA 90095-1543
- Bole lexical database: About 4200 head entries
- Bade (Western Dialect): About 3000 head entries
- Bade (Gashua Dialect): About 2500 head entries
- Karekare: About 2300 head entries
- Ngamo (Gudi and Yaya dialects): About 2400 entries (combined total)
- Ngizim: About 3600 head entries
- Duwai: About 1100 head entries
- Miya: About 1400 head entries
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