2002
VIII, 203 pp.
1 graph, 2 tables, Iraqw-English dictionary, English Index, Structure of the Thesaurus, Thesaurus Index (semantic fields: 1. the human body, 2. clothing, 3. eating, 4. house, 5. family, 6. economy, 7. social and cultural organisation, 8. language, 9. division and comparison, 10. form and position, 11. cosmos)
Text language: English
Iraqw is a Southern Cushitic language with a speaking population of 500,000 (and growing) in the Arusha province of Northern Tanzania in East Africa. It is a language which is thriving, despite the strong presence of Swahili in Tanzania. The success of its modernization process is due to the openness of the Iraqw people, who welcome new ideas and new people into their speaking group. This dictionary, however, is not a record of the Iraqw modernization process: it emphasizes those words and concepts which come from a former era in an attempt to record them before they are forgotten. Those loan words that are included are coded as such.
This dictionary reflects the tradition of the Iraqw economy (which is agriculture in combination with animal husbandry), and the dominance of Iraqw in the home sphere and in the village. The book includes a thesaurus index organized according to semantic groupings, and an English index which helps the reader find the best Iraqw approximation of an English word in the Iraqw-English dictionary itself.
under these links you will find publications by the authors and further descriptions of Iraqw and of (southern Cushitic) languages of northern Tanzania:
