Documentation and description of unheard voices: k'aʔanniʃe and ɗenke of the Ganjule

Abstract

In documentary linguistics and related disciplines, documenting linguistic and cultural communicative practices of speech communities with little-known and unwritten languages involves, among other things, digital tools, collection, analysis, archiving, and dissemination of such assets as genres of oral literature which at times tend to be sources of data about indigenous domains of knowledge and skill of communities around the world. The Ganjule of south Ethiopia are a little-known community with a rich but highly endangered oral literature and unwritten language. The salvage of these assets of humanity is worth considering in this age of globalization, seeing that the gradual loss of genres of oral literature as a result of, for instance, socio-economic contact among nations, inevitably entails often irreversible loss of linguistic expressions that mirror cultural abstractions of members of a speech community. This article deals with the literary significance of k'aʔanniʃe and ɗenke of the Ganjule oral literature together with some sociolinguistic issues. The study draws on interdisciplinary qualitative research methods of data collection and analysis, and provides researchers with original research findings that pave the way for further study on Ganjule oral literature.