Event Details

This event is co-organized by the Multilingualism and Cognition Research Group and the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C).

Using LHQ3 for the study of Indigenous multilingualisms: problems and solutions

In this talk, we present the Multilingual Transmission in Indigenous Languages in the Diaspora project, which, in its current phase, focuses on the diasporic communities of Mano and Kpelle, two West-African Mande languages, spoken in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, where they are in contact with another Mande language Susu as a societal language. With both production and comprehension/processing tasks we investigate the multilingual acquisition of morphosyntax (namely, reflexivity: Mano possesses a dedicated reflexive pronoun in the 3sg, while neither Kpelle nor Susu have dedicated reflexive pronouns) and prosody (lexical tone, Mano having three level tones, while Kpelle and Susu have two, as well as post-lexical rules, which are different in all three languages). In the talk, after briefly discussing our prior sociolinguistic research on these parameters in a multilingual Mano-Kpelle community in the homeland of both these languages, we present our preparatory work for the new project. We focus especially on the process of adjusting the LHQ3, the background questionnaire of choice, to work with a community of highly multilingual speakers, many of whom have never been to school.

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