Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Tribes that in 2008 have no written language?

A student in a communications class is looking for a name of a tribe/group that in 2008 has no written language. Any ideas? If so, please post.
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1 comment:

Stephen Francoeur said...

Here are two approaches to the question of how to find tribes/cultures that have no written language. Barbara Carrel suggested this first solution: do a keyword search for "no written language" in Gale Virtual Reference Library. You'll get eight good hits from the Encyclopedia of World Cultures and An Ethnohistorical Dictionary of China

As a second option, searching the web isn't too bad, either. Here's what you get in Google for the phrase "no written language" and here's what you get for "purely oral language."

The trick is the "in 2008" qualification of the original research question. It's going to be kind of hard to verify that as of 30 days into the month of January, these tribes still have no written language. I'm not sure how to verify that the tribes found in the search strategies above still do not have a written language.

2:37 PM, January 30, 2008

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