Topic description and stories

Words for mud and mountain, wind and wetland: answers on a postcard, please

01 Apr 2015

‘Dumberdash’ is an old Cheshire term for a short but violent storm. A ‘lumpenhole’ is a deep trench for fluid farmyard waste. The man who remembers...

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Mark Turin returning a copy of the grammar of the Thami language to one of his principal research partners and language teachers. Local intellectual Man Bahadur Thami and his daughter on the right. Cokati, Sindhupalcok, Nepal, August 2012.

The vanishing voices of Nepal, Africa – and New York

01 Dec 2012

A Cambridge academic devoted to the documentation of endangered languages has returned to a remote Nepali village to hand over a two-volume...

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Drum song performance in Accra, Ghana. Ruth Finnegan’s seminal “Oral Literature In Africa” covered stories, songs and numerous other forms of African oral culture, but the study has been out of print for many years.

“Unglue” a landmark of African cultural studies

19 Jun 2012

A campaign to republish an out-of-print classic on the subject of African culture, using funds donated by academics, enthusiasts and general readers...

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Recitation of oral texts

Voices of vanishing worlds

28 Sep 2009

A new project is recording and making accessible the endangered oral literatures of indigenous peoples before they are lost forever.

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