Tanzania Language Survey (TLS)
(Nurse and Philippson 1975)

WWW version 1.0jg 23.3.99

Pending final review for accuracy by Prof. Nurse and others, the information here should not be relied upon. The database facility is operational now (see TLS Instructions ), but it is intended only to assist in reasearch, and should not be strongly relied upon.

About the Tanzania Language Survey

The data was gathered as part of a lexicostatistical survey of about 100 Tanzanian languages undertaken in the early 1970s by Derek Nurse, Gérard Philippson and a team from the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics of the University of Dar es Salaam. For more details on the survey adn the early uses the data was put to, see:

• Nurse, D. and G. Phillipson. 1975. The North-East Bantu Languages of Tanzania and Kenya: a Classification. KiSwahili 45.2 1-28.
• Nurse, D. and G. Phillipson. 1980. The Bantu languages of East Africa : a lexicostatistical survey. Language in Tanzania. (E. D. Polomé and C. P. Hill, eds.) London: International African Institute by OUP.
• Nurse, Derek 1979. Description of sample Bantu languages of Tanzania. African Languages 5. 1-150.

The source (paper) documents for these computer files were sets of printed forms, each set containing 1079 entries in parallel columns of Swahili and English. These forms were distributed to native Tanzanians for translation into the target Tanzanian languages. Each set of forms began with a page of instructions and a short section for particulars on the individual and the language involved in the documentation. [NOTE: These "particulars" are not available on the Web] The printed forms for the survey are numbered in two sections. The main section consists of a wordlist in parallel columns of Swahili and English with room for a translation into the target language. This section contains 1052 entries numbered from 1 to 1038, with entry 929 missing. 15 additional numerical entries are suffixed with the letter a, e.g. entry 50a which follows entry 50, to make up the section's total. Following this is a short section of phrases in English, some of which are translated into Swahili, for which single terms in the target language were sought. This section, containing 27 entries, is lettered from A to Z, with a final entry designated by a slash /. These two sections are combined in the datafiles and in the database.

The computerization of the data is the work of a number of individuals, including:

• Stanley Cushingham (Center for Applied Research in African Languages, Yale University) [af614@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu]
• Lawrence Greening (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
• Towhid bin Muzaffar (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
• John Lowe (CBOLD, University of California at Berkeley) 
• Jeff Good (CBOLD, University of California at Berkeley) 
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