Oregon Public Broadcasting

This is a dying language.

You’re hearing a woman from a remote village in Sierra Leone, telling a story about the games she used to play as a girl. 

She’s speaking a language called Kim, and she’s one of only about 20 Kim speakers in the world.

This recording is part of a project called DKB, short for Documenting Kim and Bom.  The project has been recording those two endangered West African languages for the last three years. 

Tucker Childs is the project’s primary investigator.  He’s a linguistics professor at Portland State.  He says the native speakers of these two languages are not easy to get to.