| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,800,000)
Fiscal Year 2003: ¥700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000)
Fiscal Year 2002: ¥1,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000)
Fiscal Year 2001: ¥1,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The Taita is one of the Bantu speaking agriculturalist groups in Kenya. They inhabit the Taita Hills, Saghala Hills, Kasighau Hill and Voi town. Besides these hill masses and foothills, many Taita live in Mombasa, Nairobi and their vicinities.
This study based on the cultural anthropological research in the Taita Hills that explored the linguistical and cultural diversities among the Taita. The language of the Taita can be divided into three groups : Kidawida, Kisaghala and Kikasighau. The major one of them called Kidawida is spoken mainly in The Taita Hills. It has the common characters of the Bantu languages : noun classes, prefix concordance, and etc.
The first person to try and put the language of the Taita in writing was Wray.J.A. who was sent to Kenya by the Church Missionary Society in London. In 1894 he published An Elementary Introduction to the Taita Language. This book was written on a grammar of Kisaghala, because his first mission was established in the Teri valley of the Saghala Hills. More than one century has passed since he wrote this small book on Kisaghala, although a linguistic survey of Kidawida has not been studied yet.
In this study, from 2001 to 2003, I made a cultural anthropological analysis of Kidawida. The selection of vocabulary is based on Asian and African Linguistic Survey List (ILCAA) which consists of 2000 vocabularies for the purpose of comparing with Asian and African languages. I would like to continue to make a grammatical analysis of Kidawida making reference to the Wray's work on Kisaghala.
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