Kinande Dictionary- Last Updated on Monday, 02 June 2014 11:10
We are pleased to announce that the Kinande Dictionary Fund has achieved its goal! In December, 2011, 550 copies of the Kinande/Konzo-English Dictionary were shipped to Kampala, Uganda by the Africa World Press and eventually reached the hands of our distributors there. We would like to thank everyone involved for their assistance, including the Endangered Language Fund, which handled our donations.
In 2006, in connection with his participation in the Afranaph Project, Professor Ngessimo Philip Mutaka of Yaounde University 1 posted the Kinande/Konzo-English Dictionary he had written with Kambale Kavutirwaki on our website in the Kinande case file, where it is still accessible today. As linguists, it is a truism that our intellectual work depends on the communities of native speakers whose languages we study, but there is not always a simple practical way to give back for all we gain.
An essential part of the Afranaph Project involves collaborating with native speaker linguists who provide detailed information about their language, and sometimes our common interests expand from there. Professor Philip Ngessimo Mutaka, has recently completed Kinande/English and Kinande/French dictionaries as part of a project that long predates the Afranaph project (indeed his collaborator on the dictionary, Kambale Kavutirwaki, is now deceased). The Kinande/French dictionary is supposed to be soon available at the website of the Royal Belgian Museum at Terveuren, who are the publishers of that version of the dictionary and own all rights to it, and the Kinande/English version of the dictionary is posted here at the Afranaph website, but these postings are mostly for the benefit of the scholarly community.
For the dictionaries to have practical use in the Kinande-speaking communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda, as well as for the Kinande-speaker diaspora (which has come in to being due to the ongoing tensions and unrest in the region), hard copies of these dictionaries are necessary. Now printed, these dictionaries will be distributed for free to schools, churches, hospitals, municipal government, NGOs operating in the region and others who serve the community and the (small) remainder would be sold to cover additional costs of printing and distribution. Afranaph is not involved in the printing or distribution of the Kinande/French dictionary, which we do not have the right to reproduce, but for the printing and distribution of the Kinande/English Dictionary, money needed to be raised. Thanks to the generous support of its contributors, including the Kinande Dictionary Fund, Prof. Francesco Remotti, and Prof. Roland Kiessling, the dictionary is now in use in the community whose language it documents.
