LOSING THE FLAVOUR? FROM ORATURE TO LITERATURE, AND ON CHOICES WHEN COMPILING DICTIONARIES FOR UN WRITTEN AFRICAN LANGUAGES
Any hitherto unwritten language, in Africa as elsewhere, as soon as it becomes the object of linguistic and philological documentation and research, automatically crosses the Rubicon from oral to written and undergoes the first steps from orature to literature. This almost natural process may be studied under at least two perspectives: that of the linguistic and cultural ‘costs” of such transition, and that of the ideological burden in terms of stereotype and prejudice when researchers with a ‘Western’ background (by extension including researchers, also in Africa, who have been trained under the impact of ‘Western’ scholarship) approach languages and cultures of ‘others’. This links up with lexicographic work on languages which are predominantly or exclusively used for oral communication, by influencing the choices that lexicographers face in terms of lemma identification and speech variability when compiling the – often first ever – bilingual dictionary of a hitherto unwritten language.