Linguistics students at the University of California, Berkeley, are getting a chance to document a rare African language-without leaving campus. The opportunity comes via Simon Nsielanga Tukumu (left), a Berkeley resident and native speaker of Nzadi, a language spoken by a few thousand people living in fishing villages in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Berkeley linguist Larry Hyman is an expert on the Bantu languages of Africa, but until a mutual acquaintance introduced him to Nsielanga last year, he had never heard of Nzadi. The language isn't listed in the major database of human languages. Seeing a unique opportunity, Hyman recruited Nsielanga as a teaching assistant for his undergraduate class Introduction to Field Methods. By querying Nsielanga, students are piecing together the vocabulary and grammar of Nzadi.
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