Federico Falletti

Most of the world’s languages are currently facing extinction, with one language ceasing to be spoken every forty days. Along with these languages, we are losing the ancestral knowledge of their people and a piece of humanity’s cultural heritage. In an effort against this trend, this project aims to document and describe one such language, Sengwer, spoken by a hunter-gatherer community in the highland forests of Western Kenya. Considered one of the most marginalised minority ethnic groups in Kenya, the Sengwer people’s lack of government recognition as a distinct ethnic group has led to violent evictions, murder and other injustices. By describing aspects of Sengwer’s grammar, my goal is to start collecting the necessary evidence to challenge the current ethnic and linguistic classification and take Sengwer into the linguistic and international spotlight. In turn, this will aid the Sengwer people in their struggle for the recognition of their identity and their human rights.
This project will focus on describing four understudied topics in the phonology and morphology of Sengwer: number marking in nouns, grammatical tone in nominative case marking, patterns in verbal inflectional paradigms and ideophones. In particular, I will focus on tone patterns and their role in the morphophonology.