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Famiglie fragili nel Friuli di oggi. Emozioni, valori e progetti dei figli di genitori separati.
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Documentation of Kushi, a Chadic language of Northern Nigeria
No full textSummary of the deposit
Kushi is spoken in the so-called ‘Kushi village area’, a series of hamlets on the northeastern fringes of the Muri mountains (Gombe State, Shongom LGA). This collection includes audiovisual material documenting different kinds of language use: storytelling, autobiographical narrations, procedural texts, and conversations.
Part of the audiovisual material is annotated and fully glossed.
Group represented
The project deals with the language spoken by the Kushi, a Chadic-speaking group settled in the southern Gongola river basin. Kushi are predominantly Muslim, with Christian adherents representing an important component of the community. Traditional beliefs are still practiced in a more or less open way (even if less frequently) by both Muslims and Christians. The Gongola river basin is home to a constellation of ethnic groups sharing an agriculturalist tradition dating back at least to the 1000 BCE. Kushi rely on a subsistence economy based essentially on farming; their eating habits are shaped by the food production system and do not differ significantly from those of the other groups inhabiting the region. Groups living in rural areas display ‘traditional’ eating habits based on the consumption of food rich in carbohydrates and fibres and poor in proteins. According to the oral tradition, the Kushi were originally from the Kanuri dominated region of Borno. They migrated to Gwana, in Pindiga area (south-west of Gombe), where they lived peacefully until a war broke out between the Pindiga and other unidentified groups. The Kushi, seeing that the conflict was intensifying, decided to leave Gwana and moved to several other places (such as Korash, Shonghlo, Damok, Yame, Benye, Dara, and Burak) to finally settle on the slopes of the Chonge-Mona range. It was there that they found the Fojorak, an autochthonous group usually described as ‘a people of light complexion living in caves’. The reasons given for abandoning all of these places and finally migrating to Kushi are related to the lack of fertile land and scarcity of water. Kushi people and their movements as recorded in oral traditions should be interpreted as a synthetic representation of a series of numerous migrations to the northern uphills of the Chonge-Mona undertaken by different groups living in the area, and not by a single Kushi group migrated from Borno.
Language information
Kushi is a Chadic language (West Chadic, A.2, Bole-Tangale, Tangale proper) spoken on the northeastern fringe of the Muri mountains (Nigeria, Gombe State, Chonge District, Shongom LGA). The Kushi ‘village area’ encompasses the hamlets of Kauri and Kommo (westwards) and Dirang and Gomle (eastwards). The Kushi of Gomle and Dirang is considered more conservative and closer to the language spoken by the ancestors, whereas the Kushi spoken in Kauri and Kommo is seen as more exposed to phonetic change and lexical borrowing (mainly from Hausa and Pero). The number of Kushi speakers is around 11,000.
Kushi is a SVO/VSO language displaying several features resulting from a long-term contact with non-Chadic speaking groups (e.g. Jukunoid and Waja-Jen languages). Among these features, an inflated consonant inventory (37 phonemes), a large vowel inventory (10 vowels working in a system of [±ATR] harmony), and the presence of a partial logophoric system. The language has a simple tone system (two-way contrast) and a moderately complex syllabic system (CV, CVC, CVV, and CVVC). Kushi shares with other south Bole-Tangale languages a certain number of features: intransitive copy pronouns, gender neutralisation (i.e. feminine as the default gender), and development of verbal derivations to mark pluractionality. TAMs are encoded through verbal inflection and satellite markers.
Despite being the language used by the inhabitants of the village area in everyday linguistic exchange, Kushi faces the challenge given by the presence and the pressure exerted by Hausa, the lingua franca of the region. The community is already bilingual and the increasing use of the vehicular language is affecting the lexical and grammatical competence of the younger generations of Kushi speakers. This is evident, for example, in the domestic sphere where Hausa is slowly replacing Kushi, or also in the lexico-grammatical choices of the speakers: Hausa words are used instead of the equivalent Kushi item and entire sections of verbal morphology (i.e. pluractionals) are fading away and are virtually no longer in use. This process of erosion is somehow mirrored in the oral tradition: the knowledge of Kushi proverbs and folktales is shifting towards the grand-parental generation, which means that the intergenerational transmission chain of oral tradition is partly broken.
Deposit contents
The majority of bundles in this collection are audio and audio-video recordings.
Acknowledgement and citation
Users of any part of the collection should acknowledge Gian Claudio Batic as the data collector and researcher. Users should also acknowledge the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme as the funder of the project. Individual speakers whose utterances and/or images are used should be acknowledged by name. Any other contributor who has collected, transcribed or translated the data or was involved in any other way should be acknowledged by name. All information on contributors is available in the metadata
Foreigners and emotional relations with the welcoming community
Full text linkIt is estimated that in 2016 there were about 5,4 million foreigners in Italy, including those with regular residence permits, and about 22% comes from Africa. A lot is written about foreigners present in Italy but it is more difficult to know something about their lives in the community that welcomes them; hence the goal of this research was to interview a sample of foreigners from different African countries, present in some municipalities in northern Italy.
There have been many difficulties in finding people to interview, so this work can be considered only exploratory.
A brief questionnaire wad administered to a non probabilistic sample of 60 foreigners: 50,0% are students and only 10,0% are unemployed.
The three main reasons that led them to our country are study reasons (51.7%), the fact that they know someone (26.7%) or because they came to know that Italy is a country that welcomes foreigners (16.7%).
65.0% feel welcome in the community in which they live and to support integration 25.0% believes that the first step should be taken by foreigners while for 61.7% there should be a mutual approach. On the other hand, only 35.0% of respondents share the desire to integrate.
The factor analysis applied to 17 bipolar scale referring to the perception of Italians by foreigners, brought out a very positive profiles. There are extracted five factors, with 71,6% of observed variability. The first factor suggests a fully positive and reassuring representation of Italians: it is the factor of goodness. The second is a factor associated with human warmth. The third is the factor of industriousness, the fourth of the personal dimension, and finally the factor of beauty
Il comportamento elettorale: indagine esplorativa.
Full text linkThis exploratory investigation is aimed to probe what factors were involved in the voting process for the specific election appointment on 4 March 2018.
Two samples were interviewed, using the same questionnaire for two different groups. One, was a sample of adults aged 19 to 97, through direct interviews, the other was a sample of university students aged 19 to 28, through an online questionnaire.
In the elections of 4 March, 19.3% of the sample and 8.1% of students did not vote. The main motivations were political for the first sample ("I do not believe in keeping the promises of politicians" 28.5%, "I do not recognize myself in any party/movement" 22.6%, "I do not care about politics" 22.1%) and of a political or personal nature for students ("I do not recognize myself in any party/movement" 25.2%, "I had personal commitments made previously" 16.8%, "I do not believe in the promises of politicians" 16.0%).
Among those who went to vote, even if they have not done so regularly in the last 5 years, the main motivation was the recognition that voting is a right but also a duty for every citizen (78.5% of the sample and 90.3% of students). Hopes for change were also very high (45.2% and 34.6% respectively). in choosing to go to vote, poor weight had sympathy for a particular candidate (6.5% and 2.0%).
There was a high percentage of well informed voters for both groups (89.2% of the first sample and 96.0% of students). The main sources of information were national and local newspapers (54.7% and 57.3%) and political broadcasts (53.6% and 45.3%). The first sample's youth and students used the internet and social media to acquire and exchange information. In fact a small percentage of people say that they have not changed their mind after listening to or reading the information (17.0% and 8.9%), some say they have strengthened their opinions (27.4% and 19.2%) or have drawn ideas for reflection (37.2% and 56.3%)
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