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After ten years, Dr. Jakob Lesage of Humboldt University presents the most comprehensive documentation yet of a minority language in Nigeria – based on a partnership with the local community, a model for the future study of endangered languages.
Africa is home to an extraordinary diversity of languages — but that diversity is under growing threat. As economic and social change accelerates, more and more language communities, especially smaller ones, are abandoning their mother tongue in favour of the languages of larger, more dominant groups. Kam is currently spoken by just 8,000 to 11,000 people in Taraba State, in northeastern Nigeria, and is considered an endangered language.
Dr. Jakob Lesage, a linguist specialising in African languages at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, has spent the past ten years researching Kam and developing a collaborative approach to documenting it – working closely with community members including Babangida Audu, Rahab Garba , Danjuma Bello, and Gambo Musa. In 2020 Lesage published a full grammatical description of the language – one of the first of its kind for any language of Taraba State – followed by a dictionary in 2021. Together with local partners, he has also built a collection of more than 300 audio and video recordings, totaling 55 hours, documenting the language itself alongside stories, farming traditions, history, and everyday life in the Kam community. All materials are freely accessible through the archive of the Endangered Languages Programme, a project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. A website dedicated to the Kam language and community was launched earlier this year. On 31 March 2026, around 500 community members, local dignitaries, partners, and researchers gathered in the Kam village of Sarkin Dawa to mark the project's completion.
The Special Place of Kam within the Niger-Congo Language Family
Kam, also known as Nyingwom, is one of roughly 1,500 languages in the Niger-Congo family, which includes Swahili, spoken across much of East Africa. Among its distinctive features is an unusual way of forming the future tense: by repeating the verb. To say "I will eat peanuts," Kam uses something close to "I eat peanuts eat" – in Kam: ń kím gùshì kīmī. Lesage's research also produced the first systematic comparison of Kam with other Niger-Congo languages, revealing that it occupies an unusual position within the family. "It stands rather isolated within Niger-Congo," he explains. "That's probably because Kam originally belonged to a subgroup of languages that has since disappeared entirely."
Lesage first visited Sarkin Dawa and neighbouring Kam villages in 2016, as a doctoral student at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris. Over time, the project grew into something larger than a single researcher's study: a community-led initiative in which Kam speakers became documentarians of their own language and traditions. In 2021 – the year Lesage joined Humboldt University as a research associate – he began working with Elisha Yunana, a language documentarian from a neighbouring community, to train a team of local women and men in recording and transcribing their fellow speakers. Fourteen documentarians have been trained to date. "The goal was always to leave something lasting behind," says Lesage, "skills, resources, and a record that belongs to the Kam people and can serve as a foundation for future work."
A Model for the Future Study of Endangered Languages
The decentralised approach grew partly out of necessity: when the COVID-19 pandemic made travel to Nigeria impossible, Lesage distributed equipment, training, and recordings to local networks within the community, fully developing a decentralized approach. The results exceeded expectations. "This approach proved not only resilient in times of crisis, but genuinely fruitful," he says. "The community-led phase generated more material, and richer material, than the earlier researcher-led phase." Going forward, he plans to extend the model to other endangered languages in the region, supporting local translation projects and other community initiatives while helping to put a linguistically extraordinarily diverse but academically underserved part of the world on the research map.
"When a language dies, a unique way of describing the world disappears with it – its stories, its knowledge of the local environment, its history, and part of the identity of the people who speak it," says Lesage. "With the right methodology and a genuine partnership with the local community, that loss can be prevented."
Dr. Jakob Lesage
Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
E-mail: jakob.lesage@hu-berlin.de
Grammar of the Kam Language https://theses.fr/2020INAL0008
Dictionary of the Kam Language https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IJkRAg9iYtMqwnvwI--90aL2fFp6cS0J
https://www.elararchive.org/uncategorized/SO_55a0e685-47e7-4ec3-9159-2d0a036cb5b... Audio and Video Documentation on the ELAR Website
https://sites.google.com/view/kam-nyi-ngwom/home Documentation Team Website on the Kam Language and Community
Husseini Adamu is explaining how guinea corn (sorghum) is farmed by the Kam people while being filme ...
Source: Solomon Ahmadu
Copyright: Solomon Ahmadu
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Journalists
Language / literature
transregional, national
Research results, Transfer of Science or Research
English
Husseini Adamu is explaining how guinea corn (sorghum) is farmed by the Kam people while being filme ...
Source: Solomon Ahmadu
Copyright: Solomon Ahmadu
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