‘One day of lessons and the Boa people can read their own language’
Until recently the Congo’s isolated Boa community had never read a single letter in their own language: quite simply, there was no alphabet to describe the language. A crowdfunding campaign by guest staff member Gerrit de Wit has changed that. He plans to use the rest of the money to work with a Congolese linguist and writers to distribute Boa texts and research the language itself.
The Boa people first asked for help creating an alphabet for their language in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until 2018 that things began to happen. De Wit described the first Boan dialect and compiled an alphabet and dictionary, and a second Boa dialect followed. He worked with writers to produce texts in the Yewe and the Leboale dialects.
These texts are difficult to distribute because the Boa region is very inaccessible. Even De Wit has never been there. He therefore wants to use some of the crowdfunding money to distribute texts through schools and churches. In the future, De Wit also wants to work on a teaching method for writing the Boa language.
As well as distributing and increasing the number of texts in the Boa language, De Wit will also use the crowdfunding money for more research on this language. He wants to research the other Boa dialects and create an alphabet for Lebaati, a closely related language.
This project is sponsored by the donors of the Leiden University Fund (LUF). Check out the crowdfunding page.
The Boa language has a future in the DRC!