RECORDS: Remote Elicitation and Community-Oriented Recording for Dialect Studies
Project Overview
Project
RECORDS: Remote Elicitation and Community-Oriented Recording for Dialect Studies
Project members:
Tatiana Reid (PI)
Matthew Baerman (CI)
Oliver Bond (CI)
Period of award
May 2025 -
Funder:
British Academy
The RECORDS project develops and pilots a fully remote, offline-first methodology for linguistic data collection in regions where traditional fieldwork is unsafe or impractical. Many languages spoken in conflict-affected or remote areas remain under-documented - not due to a lack of scholarly interest, but because existing methods rely on physical access, stable infrastructure, and high levels of literacy.
The pilot case study focuses on Nuer, a West Nilotic language spoken in South Sudan and Ethiopia. To date, descriptive and comparative research on Nuer has relied almost exclusively on speakers in diaspora communities outside South Sudan, as direct access to speakers in their home regions has not been feasible. As a result, dialect variation within South Sudan itself remains poorly understood, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of the language. RECORDS addresses this gap by enabling the remote collection of structured linguistic data directly from speakers in their home regions.