The State of Documentation in the Tanzanian Rift

According to Hammarström (2022), the Tanzanian Rift is notable in that its languages enjoy rates of description approaching those of the languages of Europe. That is, many of the languages spoken in the Rift have extensive grammar books, dictionaries, and the like. However, amid calls for linguistic analyses to be reproducible, the proposal that "the data on which publications are based are made available so that other scientists could ostensibly verify the results for themselves" (Gawne and Berez-Kroeker 2018:23) is worth taking seriously. The gold-standard for such data would be large, durable, open-access collections of diverse naturalistic speech genres – the kind of output described by Himmelmann (2006) as a language documentation. This talk therefore makes a documentary review of the Tanzanian Rift, evaluating the documentations that already exist, as well as identifying areas for future documentation.

Note: This talk has not gone through a process of peer review, and findings should therefore be treated as preliminary and subject to change.