Andrew Harvey is deeply interested in the languages of the Tanzanian rift and was awarded a Queen Elizabeth Commonwealth Scholarship to study an MA in Linguistics at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 2011.
Tanzania, a country in East Africa known for its national parks and highest mountains in the region, is also a home to 120 different languages. According to Ethnologue’s Language Vitality Count, 43 of Tanzanian languages are listed as endangered while two are already extinct.
Andrew Harvey is deeply interested in the languages of the Tanzanian rift: their documentation and description, their morphosyntax, and the histories and cultures of their speaker communities, especially as evinced through linguistic arts and language contact. He was awarded a Queen Elizabeth Commonwealth Scholarship to study an MA in Linguistics at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 2011. Since taking up the award, documenting endangered languages, specifically the languages of the Tanzanian Rift Valley, has been the most important part of his work.
Originally focused on learning French, Andrew was drawn to studying linguistics when he took up a module on this subject to learn French better and decided to pursue Master’s degree in Linguistics which was supported by Queen Elizabeth Commonwealth Scholarship (QECS).
The QECS Scholarship was the first opportunity I had to conduct linguistic fieldwork in central Tanzania – a place with which I maintain strong social and professional contacts to this day. The time afforded by MA scholarship allowed me to develop the language and social skills required to effectively live and work in the area, as well as to develop the social bonds that make this part of the world so important to me both professionally and personally.
Andrew feels that he has been privileged because he was given the chance to have a great fieldwork experience as well as opportunities to deliver tangible outcomes in the field of linguistics. Having the opportunity to spend a year at the University of Dar es Salaam before starting his field work placed Andrew in an advantageous position. He was able to learn the lingua franca of the area, and developed an understanding of how to manage his affairs in a different country.
‘By the time I was ready to do my fieldwork for the Master’s, I had already had a year of preparation, in a sense. Luxury isn't the word because everybody should have the opportunity, but it certainly was a unique period of preparation for me. I think I'm very lucky that that set of circumstances unfolded.’
Doing a Master’s degree in Linguistics on a QECS award proved foundational. From there, Andrew went on to complete a PhD and two postdocs taking him all the way to his current position in academia as a Junior Professor of African Languages and the Construction of Knowledge at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He is also considered by others a specialist on various aspects of Tanzania.
‘My knowledge of Tanzania was limited before taking up the QECS Scholarship. Now, not only am I in some ways considered a specialist on aspects of Tanzania, Tanzania is a place with which I feel familiar, and many of my colleagues and dearest friends are Tanzanian. My knowledge of the place has developed greatly in terms of nuance and depth since taking up my studies, and Tanzania has certainly become much more complex and three-dimensional in the process.’
The QECS was suggested to Andrew by his field methods professor who herself had spent time in Tanzania and had developed great connections that could be useful for Andrew. During his Bachelor’s degree he enjoyed a Fields Methods course in which students and a speaker try to communicate with each other without knowing each other’s languages. He therefore found the prospect to do a Master’s degree in Linguistics in a country that was entirely new to him and with spoken languages none of which he had ever been exposed to particularly exciting.
‘So, I thought, I'm interested in language documentation, language description. I love this course that we did, working with a speaker of a language that I'd never encountered before. Wouldn't it be cool to do research like this? And with so many languages in Tanzania, and none of which I was familiar with, I thought that this would be a really neat opportunity. So, I thought that it fit quite well.’
From Gorwaa to Ihanzu to Hadza
Since his Master's studies, Andrew has worked on several languages, most notably Gorwaa, Ihanzu, and Hadza. He has worked with several communities in central Tanzania, documenting and describing their languages, and learning how to do this in a community-focused manner.
Andrew’s experience at the University of Dar Es Salaam was enriched by being delivered by highly trained academics who repackaged Linguistics and presented it all from a perspective of African languages and Tanzanian languages. Additionally, being surrounded by students who were mostly Tanzanians and spoke Tanzanian languages exposed Andrew to a world that not only triggered his interest in studying language theory but also prepared him well for his fieldwork.
We had a couple of Kenyans and a Ugandan and then everybody else was Tanzanian, so they all spoke Tanzanian languages as first language…. And so, it was really cool to be surrounded with people who were bringing all sorts of different language material from Tanzania. It was like a little microcosm that I was being exposed to.
Gorwaa, a South Cushitic language spoken in the Tanzanian Rift Valley, was originally suggested to Andrew during his Master’s studies in 2012 by his supervisor at the University of Dar es Salaam. According to Andrew’s estimate, the total number of Gorwaa speakers does not exceed 133,000 people although a dedicated language census has not been conducted to determine the exact number.
‘I started working with this language, Gorwaa, that was suggested to me by my supervisor…. And after that, more and more working on Gorwaa, you realise that this language is linked in interesting cultural and historical ways to other languages in the area that also have not been studied, and who nobody is set up to study yet. So, you say to yourself, in order to get a better contextual picture, I better go to this community and ask a few questions.’
Andrew graduated from University of Dar Es Slaam in 2013 and before starting his PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) London, he spent a year in the province of Newfoundland, Canada where he is from. His role at the time required him to do public engagement with young people from coastal fishermen communities to involve them in thinking and envisioning their communities in new ways. Although the role had nothing to do with linguistics, the experience trained Andrew to organise deliberative dialogue, facilitation processes, and setting up community meetings. Furthermore, these communities were mostly settled in remote rural areas, and it was an entirely new experience for Andrew who comes from a city. Although Andrew had spent time with rural communities in Tanzania during his research work for Master’s degree, the experience in Newfoundland built his skills in conducting rural social science research.
‘I was put in this position to do public engagement, but specifically to go around to some of these communities, larger and smaller all around the province, and speak with young people. And talk to them about what they thought about their communities, and to engage them in thinking about new ways to envision their communities. I did that for a year, was really cool work. I got to go to places that I hadn't been, but I also got to connect to people in a rural context that I hadn't seen before as a Newfoundlander because I grew up in the city, essentially.’
Eventually, Andrew started his PhD in Linguistics at SOAS. He used this opportunity to continue his work and completed his doctoral dissertation on Gorwaa in 2018. His doctoral work provides first description of Gorwaa grammar and uses Distributed Morphology architecture and Minimalist syntax for the grammatical analysis of Gorwaa nouns, offering a different perspective from the typically functional analyses available for South Cushitic languages.
While doing his PhD at SOAS, Andrew built networks that led him to start his first postdoc in Tokyo, funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). He studied Ihanzu, which is a Bantu family language.
‘Most of the languages in Tanzania are from what's called the Bantu family…. The Gorwaa people say that all their rainmakers are Ihanzu people. They came from the Ihanzu ethnic group years ago. And I said, I should go and ask a few questions and I ended up getting sucked in and being interested by the language.’
For this postdoc in Tokyo, Andrew made audio recordings of Ihanzu and later transcribed and translated them to understand what they meant. Under the guidance of his mentor in Tokyo, the postdoc helped Andrew build new skills and refresh the old ones related to Bantu family of languages.
Shortly after that, he applied for a funding scheme under the Endangered Languages Documentation Project (ELDP), which was at the time housed at SOAS, and went back to Tanzania to do language documentation. On this project, Andrew would go out with cameras and voice recorders and record the language spoken by Gorwaa people. He would not only ask questions about the grammar but also take snapshots of how that language was spoken at that particular time.
"So, my work went from asking questions about the grammar to recording people telling stories in Gorwaa and people telling riddles in Gorwaa. And people talking about their life histories and talking about their clan histories, and talking about how you build a house, singing songs, telling historical things. And what you do is, you record it all and then you put it into this archive that's associated with the Endangered Languages Documentation programme, and then that's preserved."
While working on the ELDP, Andrew developed interest in documenting Hadza. He applied for the second postdoc which was based at Leiden University, the Netherlands and finally got the opportunity to work with an expert who has been a mentor figure for Andrew from when he had started his Master’s degree until present.
A transition to community-driven research paradigm
The second postdoc on Hadza language brought with it unique challenges. The Hadza people are extremely marginalised in Tanzanian context and primarily live in or around Lake Eyasi - a remote area packaged with the usual challenges around access to electricity and healthcare. As a result, this was logistically a challenging documentation programme but more so due to it coinciding with COVID-19 pandemic.
These challenges required Andrew to think differently, and he ended up revising his community-driven research methodology to community-led methods.
‘It was interesting in that it taught me what my boundaries were as an individual researcher. So, it was a bit of an awakening saying like, look, I can't keep on doing this myself. I need to think about ways that I can do this as a team. … and I said, I should be teaching local people how to go and record this material and how to actually do research in their own community.’
Andrew received a small grant to train researchers from local Gorwaa speaking community in using equipment for recording audiovisual content as well as in research methods. By adapting the research methodology to build the capacity of local researchers, Andrew was not only able to collect richer material to document and archive but also left a deeper impact on the communities themselves. Later, he adopted the same local researcher model for Ihanzu and Hadza and ultimately has been instrumental in enabling the local communities to record the ethnolinguistic legacies of their languages.
‘Ultimately, I see the end users of my work to be the members of the local communities with whom I work. The nature of language documentation and description is that it is a slow-moving process, but by working in community-centred research paradigms, local members of the speaker communities have been centrally involved in the research process, and some community members (up to 13 at a time) have enjoyed part-time employment in language work for upwards of 10 years. The process of turning the results of my research into useable community outputs progresses apace, but I expect that the realisation of these results is a matter of time.’
Archive collections
Archiving records of languages, be they in the form of words, phrases, songs, or art, is known to human society for a long time. Language archiving as a field, nevertheless, is fairly new, especially ever since the technology and born-digital formats have arrived and, therefore, is increasingly becoming one of the core components of projects documenting languages.
As part of his research work, Andrew has painstakingly built archive collections on all three languages - Gorwaa, Ihanzu, and Hadza. These materials include audiovisual recordings, images, and notes all collected as part of the documentation process. These collections are regularly expanded with new recordings, transcriptions, translations, and other content. Most of this data is publicly available for further research and analyses.
Looking ahead
Currently, Andrew is a Junior Professor at the Faculty of Languages and Literatures, University of Bayreuth, Germany. In this role he teaches courses (primarily African linguistics) at both the BA and MA levels to students within a study programme called ‘African Verbal and Visual Arts’. Furthermore, he supervises BA, MA, and PhD students’ research and dissertations on African languages and African linguistics.
In addition to teaching and supervising, Andrew presents at academic conferences, writes journal articles, and currently works on an academic monograph. All of these cover topics on Tanzanian Rift Valley, including documentation, description, and morphosyntax of the languages spoken in the Valley, histories and cultures of their speaker communities, especially as evinced through things like language contact and linguistic arts.
Looking ahead, he sees himself continuing to teach, research, publish, and archive. However, his ultimate objective is to complete the circle in full, that is by bringing the impact of his work back to the very communities who originated it all in the first place.
‘There's a sign in the administrative building at the University of Dar and [It says], ‘the educated man who does not go back and give something back to his community is like the youth who has been given food during a drought and has been sent from his village to go and look for food further afield and does not return.
This idea of closing these gaps of communicating research back. So, the idea that I can be in a classroom now, and I'm teaching my colleagues from the African continent, that's very gratifying to me. But also, it doesn't end there. This idea of, I've gone out and I've made these documentary recordings, …how now do I communicate that stuff? And how now do I make these archives relevant to the people that I worked with ten, 15 years? Well, 12 years ago now. This is the constant challenge, trying to bring these things back and make them relevant and communicate them to the local community. That's the biggest thing that runs around in my head.’