Iraqw-English Dictionary

With an English and a Thesaurus Index

Author: Maarten Mous, Martha Qorro, Roland Kießling. Series edited by: Hans-Jürgen Sasse †.

Series: KuS Cushitic Language Studies Volume 18

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 (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), 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 a collection of historical Iraqw Texts, gathered between May 1935 and February 1936 by Paul Berger, edited by Roland Kießling, publications by the authors and descriptions of further southern Cushitic languages of northern Tanzania:

Accompanying material:

• Alagwa – a South Cushitic Language of Tanzania (ISBN 978-3-89645-492-8)
• Die Rekonstruktion der südkuschitischen Sprachen (West-Rift) (ISBN 978-3-89645-066-1)
• Eine Grammatik des Burunge (ISBN 978-3-89645-291-7)
• Iraqw Texts (ISBN 978-3-927620-34-6)
• The Lexical Reconstruction of West-Rift Southern Cushitic (ISBN 978-3-89645-068-5)

Cross-reference:

• „Mehr als nur Worte ...” (ISBN 978-3-89645-125-5)
• A Grammatical Sketch of Mbugwe (Bantu F.34, Tanzania) (ISBN 978-3-89645-048-7)
• Sprache und Wissen in Afrika (ISBN 978-3-89645-406-5)
• Verbal Serialisation in Isu (West Ring) (ISBN 978-3-89645-555-0)

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