OLAC Record oai:hughandbecky.us:0005

Metadata
Title:		Songs: Language Choice and Verbal Art
Abstract:		Women of the u̱t‑Maꞌin community use a variety of languages in everyday life and in poetic performance. I present hypotheses about sociolinguistic dynamics that drive the use of particular languages in songs.
Access Rights:		Open Access
Bibliographic Citation:		Paterson, Rebecca Dow. 2021. Songs: Language Choice and Verbal Art. Presented at The 7th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC), March 4–7. University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
Contributor (researcher):		Rebecca Paterson
Contributor (speaker):		Rebecca Paterson
Description:		While describing language documentation methodology in Africa, Lüpke (2010: 67) notes that documenting the performance of verbal art often requires more than just a speaker and necessitates the documentation of the situational context. Childs et al. (2014: 169) advocate for documentation of the comprehensive language repertoire of a community in it’s sociolinguistic context rather than documenting use of a single speech variety within a multilingual reality. This presentation looks at the performance of poetic form by women in the u̱t‑Maꞌin language community in a variety of settings. Paterson (2019: 8-9) lays out seven related speech varieties—u̱t‑Fer, u̱t‑Kag, u̱t‑MaꞌKu̱u̱r, u̱t‑MaꞌJiir, u̱t‑MaꞌRo̱r, u̱s-Us, and u̱t‑Zuksun—under the cover term u̱t‑Maꞌin. In addition to the u̱t‑Maꞌin varieties, C’Lela and u̱t‑Hun, neighboring languages, and the lingua franca, Hausa, are used in a range of social functions; English is the language of federal government and education; Arabic is used to express a social identity with macro-Islamic culture. However, each u̱t‑Maꞌin speaker’s grasp of these various speech varieties differs. Within recordings made while conducting language documentation fieldwork among u̱t‑Maꞌin speakers, many songs were not sung in u̱t‑Maꞌin. Rather, C’Lela, Hausa, and Arabic were used depending on the social context. In one case, a song within a folk narrative by an u̱t-Fer storyteller (Mama Iliya et al. 2013) was not intelligible to two u̱t-MaꞌRo̱r speakers who were transcribing the story. My consultants clearly expressed that the challenge for translation was because “This is not our language”. This presentation highlights the relationships between u̱t‑Maꞌin and C’Lela cultural contexts in which only some u̱t‑Maꞌin women embrace non-u̱t‑Maꞌin verbal art. Through analysis of recorded songs, discussion around the songs at the time of collection, discussion with other u̱t‑Maꞌin speakers elsewhere, and supplemental video conference interviews, I present hypotheses about the sociolinguistic dynamics that drive the use of particular languages in songs that may prove applicable to other multilingual environments.
Identifier (URI):		https://hughandbecky.us/Becky-CV/talk/2021-songs-language-choice-and-verbal-art/
Language:		English
Language (ISO639):		eng
Subject:		anthropological_linguistics
		language_documentation
		Verbal Art
		Song
		Women
		u̱t‑MaꞌRor
		ut-Ma'in language
Subject (ISO639):		gel
Subject (OLAC):		anthropological_linguistics
		language_documentation
Type (DCMI):		Event
Type (OLAC):		language_description
OLAC Info
Archive:		Rebecca Paterson's Interactive Research Portfolio
Description:		http://www.language-archives.org/archive/hughandbecky.us
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for OLAC format
GetRecord:		Pre-generated XML file
OAI Info
OaiIdentifier:		oai:hughandbecky.us:0005
DateStamp:		2021-02-22
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for simple DC format
Search Info
Citation:		Rebecca Paterson (speaker); Rebecca Paterson (researcher). n.d. Rebecca Paterson's Interactive Research Portfolio.
Terms:		area_Africa area_Europe country_GB country_NG dcmi_Event iso639_eng iso639_gel olac_anthropological_linguistics olac_language_description olac_language_documentation
Inferred Metadata
Country:		Nigeria
Area:		Africa