Lo spazio della ricerca nell'area kushi (Nigeria): lingua, comunità e documentazione

Abstract

There are two questions that fieldwork researchers committed to the documentation and description of a minority language ask themselves before venturing into the depth of their projects: 'Whom am I dealing with?', immediately followed by 'Where am I?'. As trivial as they might appear, these two questions require a minimum of research to produce an answer able to define - without necessarily framing it - the target community and the role a researcher can play in it. This paper focuses on the case study of the Kushi, a Chadic speaking group of north-eastern Nigeria. 'People' and 'space' are analysed from a sociology-of-language perspective as well as in terms of a more general dynamics of migrations and composite societal formations.

Keywords

• Kushi
• West Chadic
• language documentation
• fieldwork
• ethnolinguistic identity