A four-year grant was given by the National Science Foundation to properly document Luyia languages of Africa.

With more than 6,900 languages in the world, approximately 2,050 are said to be dead by the year 2050; however, assistant professor of English Michael Marlo and a team of scholarly researchers will not let four Luyia languages in Africa fit into that category.

A four-year grant of $343,479 was given to the project by the National Science Foundation in effort to properly document the Bukusu, Wanga, Logoori, and Tiriki languages of Africa. The foundation gets about 40,000 proposals a year for funding and accepts approximately 11,000.

The grant, which began June 1, is “a culmination of work that I have been doing and my colleagues have been doing on the Luyia languages for a number of years,” said Marlo, the principal investigator for the project.

Preliminary data has been gathered on all four languages. With that data, along with other research, the Luyia languages will be properly documented by Marlo’s team.

“Our project will generate a dictionary for each language.” Marlo said. “We are going to write for the first time really detailed studies of the grammar of the language — how you put words together, how you put sentences together. You can’t right now go to any library in the world and find that information.”

Marlo will work alongside a team of other experts to work on the team to help document these languages. Two of the team members are David Odden, a professor at Ohio State University, and Christopher Green, assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland. Odden is contributing his knowledge of the Logoori language, while Green has knowledge of the Wanga language, as well as assisting in data processing. More.

See: The Maneater

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