The Village Achang

“The Village Achang” or “Achang Village” is a long story (48 minutes), recorded in 4 parts, each in a separate wav file with its own annotation (TextGrid). The brief summary of the four parts is as follows – Part 1: Achang Village is beautiful and clean and its people are hard working. With some of the lazy people like Ongay. But drought that started late in August caused a lot of confusion. Part 2: People have to change the ways of cultivation and move to the fertile inland, because the land they used to cultivate has lost its fertility due to overuse, and this was spearheaded by a man called Pakwan. Part 3: The third activity is parallel to moving inland, and that is growing maize and vegetables on the Nile coupled with fishing. Part 4: Then the focus of the story shifts to a family in a different village. The husband Okic had married his wife Abac against the will of her family because he was poor, i.e., he had few cows. She was brutally beaten by her own relatives who wanted a better dowry. But she stuck with her choice to marry him. Now they are considering a marriage proposal in relation to their own daughter, Nyaburo; the suitor is Gano, the son of Pakwan, from the village Achang, who were protagonists in Part 3 of the story. Because Gano’s family has been working hard, they are in a good position to pay the dowry, so Okic has no concern that the difficulty which he faced when marrying will be repeated. In this way, the story leads the listener to conclude that if you work hard, these difficulties can be avoided. The recording and annotation of this narrative took place with the financial support of the Leverhulme Trust, through two grants: a) “A descriptive analysis of the Shilluk language” (RPG-2015-055) and "Suprasegmentals in three West Nilotic languages" (RPG-20202-040) to Bert Remijsen (PI). Further details can be found in the metadata file, and the excel sheet.