Tshila Fieldwork 2024 by the Numbers

From May 27 2024 to June 28 2024, Andre, John David and I did fieldwork on Tshila, an endangered Khoe-Kwadi language spoken in southeastern Botswana. We did the fieldwork in Kaudwane, which is on the edge of the Khutse game reserve. The purpose of this note is to summarize the work done during our trip.

This trip is the last under my NSF grant ‘Developing the Next Generation of Researchers Investigating the Khoisan Languages’ (June 1, 2018 to August 31, 2024). 

https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1760980&HistoricalAwards=false

There have been a total of six fieldtrips on the grant, four for Cua, and two for Tshila.

1.

9 native speaker consultants, organized into four teams

(for a total of 12 native speaker consultants over 2023-2024).

2.

805 lexical items recorded and entered into FLEx

(for a total of 1,373 lexical items over 2023-2024).

3.

6,387 sound files of words and phrases

(for a total of 9,845 sound files over 2023-2024).

4.

4 notebooks of lexical, syntax and oral texts (325 pages)

(for a total of 6 notebooks, 468 pages, over 2023-2024).

5.

39 videos (.MP4 files) (3 hours, 19 minutes, 90 seconds)

6.

6 oral texts entered into FLEx (6 minutes 55 seconds)

(wild cucumber, brandy bush, wild melon, kori bustard,

ostrich and fire, hare and lion) 

7.

37 short sociolinguistic interview audio files (3 hours 13 minutes)

8.

771 photos

(for a total of 934 photos over 2023-2024).