rapidwords.net

In February 2024, a Rapid Word Collection (RWC) workshop was conducted in Sandaun Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG) for the Abau language. The primary goal of the workshop was to add at least 1,000 new words to the existing Abau database. The workshop was facilitated by SIL Papua New Guinea’s LingCrop (Linguistics Consultant Resourcing of PNG) team, comprising four national trainees and three expat mentors. A total of 23 Abau speakers took part in the RWC workshop.

The Abau participants were divided into five word-collection groups, each with a member of the LingCrop team who served as leader (who read the English questionnaire and explained its meaning to the other group members) and a combination scribe/glosser (who wrote the Abau words and their Tok Pisin and English meanings). The collected words were handwritten in an exercise book, with columns for Abau, Tok Pisin, and English, as well as a final column where a checkmark could be added to indicate that the information had been entered in the database.

The methodology used in this RWC workshop diverged somewhat from the standard. The semantic domain questionnaire that is available from the Resources page of this website and also distributed with FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx) was used as the means of eliciting vocabulary, but no effort was made to preserve the number or name of the semantic domain where each item was elicited. The typists looked up each word that was collected to see if it was in the database or not, and if it was not there, they added it, using WeSay. If it was already there, they moved on to the next word collected.

There were seven days of word collection, with half of the first one devoted to training. A total of 4,480 words were collected, adding 1,887 new entries to the Abau database, growing it from 3,053 to 4,930, an increase of 62%. Comments by participants at the end of the workshop were largely positive, highlighting the fact that it had caused them to think of words in their vernacular that they had forgotten. Many participants also stated that they had learned new words in their own language; they realized that, for certain concepts, they had become accustomed to using Tok Pisin vocabulary in place of Abau.

(March 2017) In the town of Thionck-Essyl in the south of Senegal, speakers of the Gusilay (Gusiilaay) language are celebrating the success of a recent Rapid Word Collection (RWC) workshop, where they collected a total of 12,485 words in 11 days. The workshop was publicized on the local radio station, including interviews of participants who voiced the importance of their collective work, resulting in a room full of Gusilay speakers at the closing ceremony, ready to join the celebration.

Gusilay speaker Ibrahima Diatta and SIL’s David Wilkinson began plans in early 2016 to create the first Gusilay-French dictionary for the 20,000+ Gusilay speakers. This workshop was a step toward fulfilling the aspirations of the Gusilay—to develop and gain recognition for their language.

Held 7–25 February 2017, the workshop began with three days of training led by SIL consultant Kevin Warfel. A core group of enthusiastic Gusilay participants worked hard each day, including several members of the Gusilay literacy organization, a linguistics student, and a member of the community who evolved into the chief glosser (translator), even though no one had envisioned him in that role prior to the training period. He proved to be one of the most dependable participants, even setting the precedent for taking folders full of language data home to work on after the normal workshop hours.

As a result of the drive and dedication of the core group, the original goal of recording 10,000 words was surpassed by day nine of the workshop! By the end of the workshop, most of the recorded words had been translated and typed into the FLEx database, with a resulting mock-up dictionary printed in time for the closing ceremony.

Read the full article at sil.org.

(January 2017) Johnny Walker (SIL) facilitated a Rapid Word Collection workshop in Tanzania for two closely related language communities, Ikizu and Sizaki, with the goal of producing a joint trilingual dictionary: Ikizu/Sizaki-Swahili-English. In addition to the expected outcome of collecting more than 10,000 words, this workshop had an unanticipated positive result—a community motivated to establish a “dictionary committee” to deal with formal recognition of new terms in the language

This was the second RWC workshop that Johnny led independently after being trained in 2014, and he felt more comfortable in the role this time around than he did in 2015 when he led his first one. His increased effectiveness yielded the results we have come to expect from a fully staffed 10-day workshop: 13,504 words collected in 1,624 semantic domains.

What no one necessarily expected, but which everyone involved got very excited about, was the fact that this workshop led to the Ikizu and Sizaki communities becoming quite enthusiastic about their perceived need for developing mother-tongue terminology for modern terms like “computer,” “television,” and “radio” rather than just using borrowed words. It was decided that the decision for inclusion of such neologisms in the dictionary should be made by a committee that would research them well prior to recommending them. This "dictionary committee" is only an idea at this point, but everyone involved with the workshop—participants and organizers alike—found the initiative to be a positive and energizing next step.

Read the Ikizu-Suzaki RWC workshop report.

(July 2016) SIL Chad is partnering with FAPLG (Fédération des Associations de Promotion des Langues du Guéra) to meet the linguistic needs of the 25+ language communities in the Guéra Region. In July of this year, Rapid Word Collection (RWC) consultant Kevin Warfel led a workshop for one of those languages. Both FAPLG and SIL personnel were trained so they can conduct and teach similar workshops in other Guéra languages in the future.

On the fifth day of the workshop, two government officials, who are involved in language promotion, stopped by to see how the workshop was progressing. Everyone was thrilled to point to the progress meter showing that 7000 words had already been collected!

After hearing about and seeing what was going on, one of the officials—whose roots are in the Guéra Region—stated that his language should be the next one to benefit from this newly learned technique.

 By the end of the workshop, 13,084 words had been collected—more than most had dared to hope to achieve.

More on this topic can be found in this article on sil.org.