NUER (SOUTH SUDAN, ETHIOPIA)
In collaboration with Matthew Baerman, Irina Monich and Tatiana Reid from the University of Surrey and Bert Remijsen from the University of Edinburgh, I began working on Nuer (West-Nilotic, Nilo-Saharan) in May 2015. This started as part of the AHRC funded project ‘Morphological complexity in Nuer’ and continued during the ‘Nuer Literacy Initiative’, and now ‘NILOMORPH’.
A major outcome of our work are resources availble at www.nuerlexicon.com, including the first online, interactive dictionary of Nuer (Bond et al 2020). It comprises over 800 lexical items, exemplified by over 1100 noun and verb paradigms and 1400 audio recordings and examples. Users can search in Nuer and English and toggle between results in two modes, one aimed at Nuer speakers, rendered in our version of the practical orthography, and another aimed at linguists using transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The interactive interface allows users to reveal morphological patterns such a tone and vowel length alternations that are otherwise opaque to learners, since they are obscured by the writing system. The lexicon is designed to be an interactive and growing resource. Users are able to offer corrections to existing entries and to suggest new entries and example sentences.
We also co-produced 60 new digital storybooks in collaboration with a team of Nuer speakers across the globe. As of September 2024, we have distributed 19,500 free printed books to benefit Nuer speakers, heritage learners and second-language learners in East Africa and beyond.
http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/languages/nuer/
TAMANGIC AND TIBETIC (NEPAL)
My documentation and descriptive work in the Himalayas, carried out in summer 2012, 2013 and 2014 in collaboration with Kristine Hildebrandt from SIUE and Dubi Nanda Dhakal from Tribhuvan University, has focussed on four Tibeto-Burman languages – Manang Gurung, Manange, Nar-Phu and Gyalsumdo – which are spoken in the villages of Manang District in central Nepal.
Our collaboration has lead to papers on language contact and sociolinguistic variation (Hildebrandt, Bond and Dhakal 2023, Hildebrandt et al. 2015), kinship (Hildebrandt, Bond and Dhakal 2018), and a grammatical sketch of Manange (Hildebrandt and Bond 2017).
http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/languages/tamangic/
ELEME (NIGERIA)
I’ve also carried out fieldwork on Eleme (Ogonoid, Benue-Congo), an under-described Niger-Congo language spoken in southeast Nigeria. My published work on Eleme includes treatments of negation (Bond 2016) agreement (Bond 2010), logophors (Bond 2006) and valence changing morphology (Bond 2009) as well as work on the genetic constituency of the Ogonoid family (Bond and Anderson 2006) with Greg Anderson from the Living Tongues Institute.