George Okedinachi Iloene

Koring is an under-documented unwritten Upper Cross language spoken in parts of Ebonyi and Benue States of Nigeria, with a rapidly diminishing fluent native speaker population. There is not much of formal linguistic study of this endangered language. This project will produce the first book manuscript of the phonology of the Koring language. About 1000 Koring words shall be digitally elicited and recorded from Koring native speakers to obtain the primary data for phonemic analysis. The data are transcribed using IPA convention. All digital recordings shall be archived at the E-MELD. The theoretical framework we shall adopt is the linguistic phonetics theory as enunciated and discussed in Ladefoged, 1971, 1982, 2005 and Maddieson, 1984. The result of our analysis will guide us in the production of a Koring phonology book manuscript for teaching, learning and literacy materials, and for purposes of language documentation and preservation.