Guébie language documentation project

Project lead: Prof. Hannah Sande, Georgetown University

The Guébie language is spoken in seven villages in the prefecture of Gagnoa in southwest Côte d’Ivoire. Before Dr. Sande began working with the Guébie community in 2013, there was no prior documentation or description of the language. The Guébie language documentation project, supported by a 42-month NSF DEL grant (award number 1760302), allows for Dr. Sande and a team of undergraduate and graduate students from Georgetown University to continue documenting the grammar of the language, with a particular focus on tone, intonation, and nonconcatenative morphology. In addition to documenting and describing the language, the documentation team has also started teaching English classes in Gnagbodougnoa, the largest Guébie-speaking village.You can learn more about the documentation team and their work in this article by Global Georgetown. The materials recorded as part of this project will be archived and publicly available in the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR).

Through this project, Guébie data has been collected, analyzed, and presented at a number of national and international conferences, including a talk by Dr. Sande and PhD student Maddie Oakley at the Laboratory Phonology meeting in Lisbon, Portugal in June 2018, and two talks at the World Congress on African Linguistics in Rabat, Morocco in August 2018.