AFROBEE

The proposed project investigates the language of traditional home-garden beekeeping, forest beekeeping and honey hunting in Africa, i.e. cultural practices that are threatened by climatic changes and deforestation, and impacted by the introduction of industrialized beekeeping. Based on annotated corpora of natural language as well as lexical databases, two in-depth case studies focus on beekeeping as practiced by the Kambaata (Ethiopia) and honey hunting as practiced by the Hadza (Tanzania). Adopting methods of linguistic documentation, ethno-linguistics, lexical typology, areal and historical linguistics, the project investigates (i) the structure of the lexicon of beekeeping and honey-hunting (e.g. dedicated, derived and compounded apicultural terms, intra- and inter-field polysemy) and (ii) the discourse of beekeepers and honey hunters about their activities and roles, the relationship between humans, bees and honey predators, and the medicinal, cultural and social significance of honey. The project’s transversal research strand studies selected bee- and honey-related terms across Africa, based on existing lexical databases and supplemented by targeted questionnaires. The aim is to uncover shared words (cognates and loans) and lexicalization patterns (e.g. shared polysemies, shared word-formation patterns) and their clustering in specific language (sub-)families or geographical areas. This will help us gain first insights into the history of the spread of beekeeping techniques in Africa.