Dictionaries

The wordlists below were prepared from copies of Appleby's 1943 Luluhya-English Vocabulary, digitized (with the help of Sarah Crane, Namira Islam, and Callie Masten, undergraduate students at the University of Michigan in 2006), printed, and distributed to one or two speakers of most Luyia dialects in summer 2006. Appleby's lexicon was based on central varieties of Luyia and is therefore probably closest to the Kisa, Marama, and Wanga dialects. Speakers were asked to retranslate Appleby's entries into their own dialect. In cases where the translated word is identical to the form found in Appleby's Vocabulary, speakers were asked to put a checkmark or "tick" by the word. Where there are differences, either orthographic or in the definition of the term, speakers were asked to re-write the appropriate lexical entry or gloss. In some dialects, other conventions were used to indicate the appropriate form, such as crossing out the pre-prefix, e.g., to indicate ba-kuka where the original is a-ba-kuka 'forefathers'.

The handwritten forms of these dictionaries provided below represent their current and most up-to-date state. We are actively searching for native speakers of these dialects to aide in the data entry and editing process to produce more useful dictionary materials. (Please contact Michael Marlo if you can help!) We hope to produce initial, preliminary drafts of each dictionary like the Wanga dictionary found here. This format lacks tone-marking but is potentially useful to native speakers and can be easily distributed. Subsequently, we hope to produce drafts of each dictionary that are useful to linguists and include tone- and vowel length-marking, as in the Bukusu dictionary found here. Additionally, for the Idakho, Isukha, and Logoori dialects, phonetic transcriptions will be required to indicate vowel quality differences; these dialects have at least seven and probably nine vowels. Ultimately, we would like to turn these works into full-fledged dictionaries with textual examples to show common usages of the entries. Updated drafts will be uploaded to the Dictionaries page of Michael Marlo's website when they become available.

With the assistance of Alfred Anangwe, several of the speakers who prepared the dictionary materials were recorded pronouncing each of the entries in the dictionaries. Some recordings, such as the ones Anangwe produced himself on the Wanga dialect, are excellent; others are not as useful. These recordings are available to anyone interested and may be used in producing more phonetically accurate transciptions of the entries, though even with these materials, additional elicitation with a native speaker is recommended.

RAR files can be decompressed by free WinRAR software.