Building Relationships: Grammatical Documentation of Mada, an endangered Niger Congo language of North-Central Nigeria

Presented by Shammah Daniel Makpu at the Language Documentation and Archiving Conference, Berlin & Online, 4-6 Sept, 2024 Field linguists acknowledge that native speakers are the most important resource in any fieldwork project, and how they are engaged defines both short-term and long-term outcomes of any language documentation or revitalisation efforts. Consequently, the dynamics of interaction between the researcher and the language community in the field remains an integral aspect of linguistic fieldwork enquiry. The present study is a language documentation project focused on the Mada language, a Niger-Congo language of North- Central Nigeria, which is highly endangered due to insufficient documentation, limited use in critical domains and the prevalence of linguistic exogamy among its native speakers. The dataset is a 100,000-word corpus of public and private monologues and dialogues compiled by the researcher and analysed using a descriptive-typological approach. Critical aspects of data collection and transcription expose the conflict between socio-political expediency on the one hand, and research/personal ethics and other best practices in linguistic fieldwork on the other. The researcher is faced with a wide range of peculiar contextual realities in speech communities, which often challenge one’s professionalism and idealistically crafted principles of research, thereby potentially impeding research progress, and stretching the researcher beyond academic competencies, to intercultural competencies. Building meaningful relationships with the language community proves invaluable even for a researcher connected by ethnicity and heritage. A robust morphosyntactic description is the foundation for the longer-term objective of developing primers for language teaching and learning. This research demonstrates the centrality of native speakers in investigating, revitalising and reclaiming endangered languages, and the ways in which the researcher becomes the catalyst for engaging and supporting indigenous communities in collaborative and community-driven documentation efforts. By extension, it exemplifies the interconnectedness of human relations and computational, digital and data-driven approaches in language documentation outcomes.