Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

Ndogoic is a Ubangi language family of 5 languages (Ndogo, Tagbu, Bai, Bviri, Sere). They are mostly from an area in today's South Sudan and probably still spoken, but the last available sources date back to the 1980's. The goal of my Master's thesis is a reconstruction of this family, as thorough and complete as possible. Using the comparative method on non-spread-zone lineages comes with its own challenges, as one has to expect a lot of interference from language contact. Another issue is the available corpus, which is not small but often not recorded according to modern standards and even contradictive at times. In the talk I will present my data, my approach to the mentioned issues and show some preliminary results regarding proto-Ndogoic phonology and lexicon, based on Swadesh-lists of the five languages.