PROJECT SUMMARY

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Ethiopia is a multilingual and multicultural nation; it is believed that more than 80 indigenous languages are spoken in Ethiopia. In line with this, Ethiopia has developed a language policy that promotes the right of every language to be documented, developed, and promoted. As a result, today, language and cultural documentation and description needs due emphasis. AMU, at its all levels, as a research university, shall contribute to this urgent call. Such language and cultural documentation research engagements contribute to documenting, if not maintaining, the rapidly fading up linguistic and cultural elements of, particularly, endangered languages and cultures. Among such endangered languages that embedded with cultural practices, Koegu language is one. Koegu language and culture is one of the undocumented and least studied languages in the area. This comprehensive grand research project aims at documenting and describing the language and cultural elements of Koegu which is one of the sixteen ethnic groups in Southern Omo. Specifically, the study will focus on identifying the level of endangerment of Koegu language, documenting the cultural practices of Koegu people, describing the phonological, morphological and syntactic features of Koegu language, and preparing a mini trilingual dictionary. To collect/record data, we planned to use varied methods namely interview, focus group discussion, observation, questionnaire, elicitation, and secondary sources. The printout and electronically documented products of the project and various publications that result from them will have paramount contributions to a future project that might aspire to exhaustively document and describe Koegu language and culture.