Are you feeling cold?

My first week in Alakpeti has gone well. I'm in very good hands with my homestay family here and I am settling in, meeting more people, and slowly learning the language. The paramount ruler has now officially introduced me to the local rulers, elders, and queen mothers and they have officially welcomed me in their midst.

The entrance to my family's compound. The solid wood fufu mortar is next to the blue rain barrel (with an orange dish in it).

With the approval from the top level and the next level down, I will now be traveling to each of the Logba towns and villages (letting each one know when I'll be coming in advance) to meet with the people who have expressed interest in working with me. This will be the start of what is more conventionally considered to be 'language documentation' (of course, all of the preparation leading up to this is also an extremely important part of the work and is not to be dismissed as trivial! Planning, preparation, permissions, and getting to know people to a point of mutual trust and respect are also crucial to the work).

The view from across my family's cassava (and other things) garden to one of the peaks in the mountain range. The large palms are oil palms. I had palm fruit soup today with banku for lunch. The fronds are used for weaving and making hand-held brooms. The sap is tapped for palm wine and then distilled to make a local liquor (akpeteshie).  The fruit and nut are used for soup and oil. The oil can be used in making soap and 'red-red:' fried ripe plantains (which are red) with beans in palm oil (which is also red) - I had this for breakfast this morning. I have read that the husks of the fruit were previously charred and used to flavor water kept in tall ceramic containers with bulging bases and narrow necks (I would venture a guess that this maybe also contributed to purification of the water, but I am not an expert in this). The roots are used medicinally.
These are pretty powerful plants!

Since not (quite) all of my friends are linguists (I swear I have broad interests! Luckily, so do the bulk of my linguist friends), what is language documentation?

-eye stretch break-

Let me just pause for a second to admire the fact that about sixty feet outside my window a very large tree is blooming with triangular tufts of pink flowers. It is absolutely gorgeous!

Okay, language documentation is the documentation of language! This can involve written notes, audio recordings (on wax cylinders, as used to be done, or on SD cards, as is now becoming more common), video recordings (sign language research and gesture research make excellent use of this), and photographs to give context and visual referents. As we learned in the Plants Animals Words 2013 workshop, for plants a voucher specimen and botanical identification are also very important, and identifying animals can involve many things besides careful photographs, for instance information about behavior, flight patterns and wing shape (for birds), coloration, and scat.

Language is a powerful tool and it can be used to describe a diversity of experience in the natural (and supernatural!) world. Linguists are trained in many things, but by celebrating our own expertise and acknowledging our limits, we can benefit greatly from teaming up in a collaborative framework with many other experts, both from within the community in a participatory framework and also across disciplines in an interdisciplinary framework.

-ear break (do ears need to be stretched like eyes?)- 

There is a chorus of at least three completely different types of birds singing outside my window right now! And I think I hear my family preparing fufu...

Language documentation also includes a lot of metadata, which is information about the data, such as the names of those involved, how they were involved, the location, time, date, topic, equipment used, the languages included, and just about anything else you can think of to note that might be relevant either now or in the future. After my job working in the Endangered Languages Archive and going through the MA program in Language Documentation and Description, I now joke that, "I'm really not a fan of labels - but I do like metadata!"

Quick facts:

• Not everyone who does language documentation is working with an endangered language. You can document languages considered stable or dominant, as well.
• Not all languages are spoken. There are also sign languages, many of which are highly endangered. And there some amazing researchers whose focus is on documenting or advocating for these.
• Not everyone who does language documentation is an 'outside researcher.' There are a growing number of people who are speakers (or heritage speakers, whose parents or grandparents may have been speakers even if they themselves are not fluent) of the language they are documenting. 

As for myself, I am definitely in the first camp, and this obviously has implications for the work I am doing. Though I have been invited to do this work by the paramount ruler, have been welcomed by the local rulers, and have been adopted into the royal family by the paramount ruler and his wife (four years ago), I am still an outsider in many many ways. I was not raised in the Logba Traditional Area, let alone in Ghana. I am still learning to speak the language (though as I keep trying, people tease me that I am already an "Akpanadze" or [female] Logba citizen). And my skin color is obviously very different, and with it comes all sorts of connotations. So I acknowledge this as I do my work and am educating myself on critical ways of approaching my research. I welcome critique from those with other perspectives and experiences than my own.

-smelling break! (don't 'break' your nose)- 

Outside my family's compound there are several sweet smelling trees, including Frangipani (Plumeria spp.) and also this one, which I believe is Ylang Ylang (Cananga odorata). In the evenings when there is a breeze its lovely scent wafts throughout the compound. I keep a few crushed up flowers by my bed.

Ylang Ylang tree (Cananga odorata) just outside my family's compound. In the evenings we often sit in chairs out here to enjoy the cool breeze and visit with neighbors who pass by.

Fruit of Cananga odorata. 

Flower of Cananga odorata.

I leave you now with a few more observations:

Women in transportation

In Accra just before I left, I rode for the first time in a trotro which had a female 'mate!' (Well, aside from the time in Kumasi when the mate was taken away by the police [both smiling and joking with each other] for trying to steal passengers from another trotro at a busy stop and my classmate, Rachel, happily took on the role of mate for the rest of the journey.) The mate is the person who calls out the destination of the trotro, collects money, and tells the driver when to 'bus stop' and then 'yenko!' ('Let's go!'). I also recently was beeped at by a female taxi driver - again, the first I'd seen in Ghana. Beeping at someone with your horn is usually a question, accompanied by a questioning hand gesture, meaning, 'Need a lift?' It is most frequently directed at those who look like the can afford a taxi, such as anyone in a suit or anyone who looks foreign (or exhausted by the heat!).

The cold

Up until recently I had never heard a Ghanaian in Ghana swear (at least not in English). What caused this sudden need for expletives? I was being told of the person's trip to London and how cold it had been! So cold that it made your hair stand on end. So cold that you had to wear thick socks under your shoes. So cold that you had to wear a warm hat with only your eyes and nose sticking out, and three layers of shirts with a jacket! -expletive expletive-

In contrast:

I was recently asked one evening, "Are you feeling cold?" (I was wearing shorts, a tank top, and sandals, and quite enjoyed the breeze!)

I couldn't help but laugh and laugh, then managed to reply, "I've just come from London!" Everyone joined me in laughter. They insist that if I wake up at 4:30am and go outside it will feel "cold like London!" but I've not yet tested this.

Okay my dears, that's all for now!