Akha texts, stories and linguistics

 

This homepage is focused on the material from professor Inga-Lill Hansson’s lifelong research on the Akha language (modern and archaic), stories, rituals texts, and songs.
The idea is to make all this material available for Akha communities, researchers, and the general public.
It also serves as a tool for Inga-Lill Hansson and her friends working on their “Akha project”.

LEFT: Akha People Death Ritual Songs Inga-Lill Hansson Project - RIGHT: CoRSAL www-resources Contact

   

Linguist Jose worked with Inga-Lill from May 18th 2024

Linguist Jose Benavides came to Copenhagen / Malmö to help Inga-Lill do transcription and glossing of The Death Ritual and other texts using the SW-pack FLEx.

He also helped Inga-Lill and Søren search through her Mac and find more already transcribed material.
We worked together for 5 weeks from his arrival on May 18th 2024.

He is halfway through his Ph.D. studies of linguistics at Indiana University, IU Linguistics department, USA.
He is also working on a minor in Computational Linguistics, so he is trained in FLEx and other computer tools.

The Akha People

The Akha are an indigenous people who traditionnaly live in small villages at higher elevations in the mountains of Thailand, Yunnan Province of China, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam.

Total population is apprx. 750,000 distributed more or less like this: Thailand 110,000, Yunnan Province of China 500,000, Myanmar 20,000, Laos 100,000, and Vietnam 20,000.

The traditional form of subsistence for the Akha people has been, and remains, agriculture. The Akha have traditionally employed slash and burn agriculture. A number of Akhas now live in cities.

The Akha people speak the language Akha** which is a language in theSino-Tibetan language family.

No documented script for this language existed before the 1950s. Since then, foreign linguists, missionaries and indigenous activists have devised a number of writing systems.
The most recent Romanized Akha writing system (Common Akha Orthography, or ‘CAO’) is agreed upon by a regional network of Akha in Jinghong, China, in January 2009. It seems to include Akha communities in all the neighbour countries?

Akha religion—zahv—is often described as ancestor worship, but emphasizes the Akha connection with the land and their place in the natural world and cycles. The Akha put a heavy emphasis on genealogy. An important tradition involves the recounting by Akha males of their patrilineal genealogy.

Information partly based on information from Giulio Ongaro.
Supplementary information can be obtained e.g. from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akha_people.

The Death Ritual, A selected Akha story

The Death Ritual

The Akha have a rich orally based literature and ritual texts handed down from generation to generation through specially and severely trained priests.

Inga-Lill worked with the priest Abogo who knew by heart hours and hours and hours of recitation of texts. They fill up thousands of pages in Inga-Lill's notebooks.

We have here focused on the long ritual used for death ceremonies.

Find an English version of the first 98 pages af the Akha Death Ritual, scanned, pdf, 3,9 Mb. This is pages 1-98 out of a total of 218 pages. The rest will come later.

Find also a combined Akha-English version of the first 60 pages of the Akha Death Ritual, scanned, pdf, 3,9 MB.

The Death Ritual in Danish

Small excerpts of the text have been translated into Danish:

Excerpt 1: This text is describes how the message about the death is brought to the village. [Section 2, 93.2]

Excerpt 2: This text describes a birth in the village.
[Section 3, 93.91-94.03]

Excerpt 3: The text desribes the life around the dancing place in the village. [Section 3, 94.78]

Some Akha songs

Some love songs and also instrumental music. Very beautiful:

Hear them from the "Search function".

Inga-Lill Hansson

Inga-Lill is a linguist specialized in classic Chinese and Akha* language and ritual texts.
She worked as an associate professor in East Asian Languages at Lund University in Sweden from 1982 until 2010, teaching Chinese and Thai (a language she had used as a go-between language for studying Akha in Northern Thailand).

See her full CV:
She is educated from the University of Copenhagen, East-Asian Institute. She is Swedish and now lives in Malmö in Sweden.

List of her publications and papers:
Her main research is on the grammar and ritual texts of the Akha people and their language.
At scholar.google.com you can find most of Inga-Lill's publications. Some can be downloaded as pdf-files. Others from XML-format via an html-browser. Some partially read from a bookformat. And some just registered with title and some more information.

Inga-Lill is determined to make her work available to the Akha people and researchers in e.g. linguistics, anthropology, and religion.

At present a group of friends help her make her full research material available for the outside world, and more concretely to make her many pages of the Akha Death Ritual ready for publication.

She expects all users of the material to live up to good research ethics, thus referring to her and mentioning various phimas*** (transmitters of ritual texts, especially the phima Abogo) and shamans*** who acted as informants / consultants for her research into Akha.
Also to honour the long line of Akha people who have kept these ritual texts alive from the time of far-gone ancestors until today.

Our Akha project

Our ultimate dream is that Akha people, culture, and language stay vibrant and healthy in the future. Our contribution to this end is to ensure:

That all the thorough and comprehensive material from Inga-Lill Hansson’s research is preserved. That is the linguistics description of the language and the transcripts of traditional stories of Akha people.

And that all this is set at the disposition of Akha people, schools, Akha politicians, and researchers and also in general is made available to linguists, anthropologist, and the broad public.

We are a number of friends who have followed Inga-Lill Hansson and her research from back in the 1970’es.
We collaborate with Inga-Lill and with the CoRSAL-project at UNT. And we hope to get an international collaboration with Akha-communities.

Guidelines for transcription of the Death Ritual (in Danish)

This subpage is only for project members helping in the transcription phase. KLIK HER

 

Notes:

* Disclaimer: This homepage is managed by the 'Akha project group' who are friends of Inga-Lill Hansson. We are not researchers of Akha language or culture, so that some mistakes in the text may be expected.

** The Akhas that Inga-Lill Hansson has mainly studied, are the Akhas of Northern Thailand near Chiang Rai.
The language and the people are called by different names:

  • Akha (in Akha language, classic international script that we use on this website).
  • Aqkaq (in Akha language, the new CAO script).
  • Eka (in Thai language).
  • Aini (in Chinese language).
  • Somtimes called Hani in Chinese.
  • The word Hani in Chinese is apparently also used for a subgroup of languages similar to Hani, including Aini (Akha).

Akha is placed like this in the international language classification:
Sino-Tibetan > Tibeto-Burman > Ngwi-Burmese > Ngwi > Southern > Akha. Source: Languages of the World, www.ethnologue.com/subgroup/4048/.

*** Shaman and phima (Akha words):

  • Phima: A person who transmits and recites ritual texts. The title of a person with the relevant training and function. It might take 20 years as apprentice to become a phima. Some people call this role 'priest', but that is a misleading word in this context. A phima is alwas a man.
  • Thoma: A person who can recite texts, but does not have the function of a phima.
  • Njipha: A shaman. A person who can cure illnesses and travel to the world of the ancestors. A shaman can be a man or a woman.

Hansson’s Akha material in the CoRSAL Archives

Direct search in the archive

Glass Look for specific Tapes, Notebooks, Publications, or Photos on Akha CoRSAL

Access and Introduction to the Archives

The Akha collection
It is available from digital.library.unt.edu/explore/collections/CORSAL/.
More material will appear during the coming months.

Interview with Inga-Lill Hansson
In this video Inga-Lill Hansson tells about her research and life with the language and people of the Akhas.
She is interviewed by professor Shobhana Chelliah and PhD Candidate Mary Burke in Malmö, Sweden, November 6th, 2022.
28 minutes. If you want full screen, then press 'YouTube', that bringes you to youtu.be/EkCrg2bMKw0.

Interview with Søren Borch
In this video Søren Borch tells about how Inga-Lill Hansson's research material is structured.
He is interviewed by professor Shobhana Chelliah and PhD Candidate Mary Burke in Malmö, Sweden, November 6th, 2022.
20 minutes. If you want full screen, then press 'YouTube', that bringes you to youtu.be/UErGAXg_I9M.

The CoRSAL website

The Computational Resource for South Asian Languages (CoRSAL) is a digital archive for source audio, video, and text on the minority languages of South Asia.
By autumn 2023 the archive includes 22 languages.
See digital.library.unt.edu/explore/collections/CORSAL/.

The CoRSAL project is further described on the site corsal.unt.edu from where you can also access the archives, and from where you can go into more information on publications, happenings, symposia, training, research, contact and more.

CoRSAL VII Symposium, October 2023

The flyer for the Symposium, incl.list of latest collections.

"In the 2023 symposium VII, we will hear from our depositors about their archived materials and future plans to expand and share their collections. The symposium will be held on Thursday, 26 October 2023 from 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM (EST, i.e. Indianapolis time) via Zoom."

Sørens has prepared a video for the symposium to explan in 5 minutes all about the Akha part of the CoRSAL archives:

Learn here about Hansson's valuable lifetime collection of the Akha language and culture.

You can read about the former CoRSAL-symposia at corsal.unt.edu/symposia. The 2023-VII'th symposium agenda will soon be uploaded to the site.

To join, please register here. The signing process will inform you about the actual time at your spot in the world. As an example, at Copenhagen, Denmark, it is the 27 from 01:00 AM to 03:00 AM, i.e. in the middle of the night ;-).
In case you cannot join in real time, then see the full VII-symposium on video when it has been edited and uploaded to the same website, i.e. to corsal.unt.edu/symposia.

Examples from Inga-Lill's Akha Archives in CoRSAL

Lyrics of a song
As an example, you can see the Inga-Lill's transcript of the lyrics of a song describing the weather and foods eaten during the swinging festival, including a metrical analysis of syllables per line. Each of the nine verses start and end with the word/sound "shé e" that signifies a type of song/singing/melody. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2018450/.

Notebook
Another example could be one notebook out of numerous notesbooks from the hand of Inga-Lill Hansson. This is notebook no. 29 containing 32 pages with handwritten notes including instructions for building a traditional Akha house using bamboo and thatch grass. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2017680/

Sound/Audio tape
Akha song from tape 10 side A, first 10:20 minutes. Edited apprx. 1977 by Inga-Lill Hansson. Listen to WAV-file.

CoRSAL Social Media

The CoRSAL Facebook group is open. You can join and follow news.

The CoRSAL Twitter / X site.

The CoRSAL YouTube site.

The CoRSAL Newsletter / Happenings with an introduction to the latest new languages in the collection, including Inga-Lill Hansson's Akha material.

Background for Inga-Lill Hansson to join CoRSAL

When we – the friends of Inga-Lill –visited her throughout the years in her apartment in Malmö, we were encircled by her research material: Hundreds of audio tapes, notebooks and research analyses. Research publications, daily life descriptions, ritual texts, folk stories, songs, and photographs.

Inga-Lill retired in 2010 and did no longer have the resources to significantly improve nor further publish her research. And she had not found a researcher or a university that would take over.

The menace of losing all this valuable material tormented us for many years.

But now, out of the blue, a fabulous future home for all her Akha research material showed up and materialized.

At the College of Information at University of North Texas (UNT), Professor Shobhana Chelliah had heard of all Inga-Lill’s material. And she immediately understood the value of it.

The Computational Resource for South Asian Languages (CoRSAL) is a digital archive for source audio, video, and text on the minority languages of South Asia.
And in autumn 2022 they already had a well-functioning website with 19 other languages.
See digital.library.unt.edu/explore/collections/CORSAL/.

Very fast Professor Shobhana Chelliah and PhD Candidate and Research Assistant Mary Burke arranged to come to Malmö, and during an intensive workshop from 3rd to 6th November 2022 it was agreed on how to proceed, interview videos were shot, and material was taken to be copied in Denmark or in Texas.

Version 1 of the Akha material was on the CoRSAL website by 13th of December 2022.
And now we all feel a tremendous relief. The second part is expected to be on the website during the autumn of 2023. And a third part, maybe the rest of the material from Inga-Lill, will probably be available within a year more.

Akha resources in other parts of the world

I don’t have a full overview of the probably many interesting resource spots in the world for Akha language and culture. If I pick up knowledge on this, I shall try to mention it here.
Some interesting resources that I have become aware of are:

Akha-archive at MPI (Max Planck Institute)

One very interesting archive, parallel to Inga-Lill’s archive at CoRSAL, is the archive of Friedhelm Scholz’ Akha material (1928-2000) that via Heidelberg University has ended up in a project in collaboration with Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands.

While Inga-Lill’s archive comes from the hands of a linguist with quite some interesting elements for anthropologists, Scholz’ archive is from the hands of an anthropologist with quite some interesting elements for linguists. They probably supplement each other well.

The Akha-archive from Max Planck Institute / Heidelberg University can be found at archive.mpi.nl/islandora/object/tla:1839_00_0000_0000_0020_D1FD_D with 1) Cassette recordings, 2) Documentation and 3) Reel to Reel recordings.

The collaboration between the two organisations concerning Scholz’ Akha material is mentioned here www.uni-heidelberg.de/uniarchiv/wider_en.html

Max Planck has a DOBES archive with several other endangered languages.

Akha-archive at ELAR

Deposited by linguist Jacob Terrel, University of Hawaii.

Songs of the Akha Shaman, training native speaking documenters:
This is a sample of collection of recordings, videos, and texts related to Akha Zanr, the indigenous religion of the Akha (ahk) of northern Mainland Southeast Asia. It includes over ten hours of .wav recordings of Pirma Gavq, an Akha Shaman, reciting the religious text “Buffalo Knowledge One”.

This amounts 6,500 verses of religious prose; all have been transcribed using the Akha orthography, and around seventy percent of the verses are accompanied by a gloss and free translation in both modern, spoken Akha and English.

This is collection focuses on Archaic Akha, a code which is not mutually intelligible with modern Akha.
According to community reports, the archaic code is spoken by perhaps only 100 elderly shaman.
The collection may be used by the community for educational materials, and also serve as the basis for a reference grammar of the language.

Other materials include interviews, photographs, written texts and video related to the funeral rite as performed by the Akha Shaman.

General information on the Akha-archive. Some (all?) of the Akha-files may be found at the Akha part of ELAR.

ELAR and ELDP in general:
The archive apparently contains some 800 languages, elararchive.org/collections/.
The Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) was created in 2002 together with the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) in response to the dramatic decline of linguistic diversity.

Akha at 'World Oral Literature Project'

An urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record.

Website of 'World Oral Literature Project' at University of Cambridge: www.oralliterature.org/.

The Akha part is called "Jacob A. Terrell: Archaic Akha, Songs of the Akha Shaman, 2009-2011" and is found here: www.oralliterature.org/collections/jterrell001.html with links to archives and access to listen to audios.

More information on the project at Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Oral_Literature_Project.

Akha Heritage Foundation

Oregon, USA.

Mission Statement:
The Akha Heritage Foundation seeks to defend the human rights and culture of the Akha people and promote self determination for the Akha while assisting with nutrition, medical and educational needs. We believe that the security and well-being of Akha communities must take priority over "development" by outside interests.

It is a comprehensive site with a large number of blogs and links to organisations etc. http://www.akha.org/

Akha Churches in Thailand

ACT, Akha Churches in Thailand and the history of Christian churches in the area. Lifestyle of Akhas. Photos and more. www.akha.ch

Akha-English dictionary

Paul White Lewis compiled and published an Akha-English dictionary in 1968. You can find it at ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/57538. You can download it as a pdf-file. Includes some introduction to Akha grammar.

Akha-links from Google, Bing etc

Here is my present selection (Oct 2023) of interesting links:

Other Akha researchers, communities, museums etc ?

I am looking into this at present. We shall see what I find :-)

Maybe “Akha Museum in Yunnan, China (artifacts, visual art, and textual material)”.

Please write me if you have anything you believe might be relevant on this present website.
Especially I lake links concerning the linguistic aspects.

Contact

This homepage is administered by Søren Borch.
He is also the contact person to The Akha Project of Inga-Lill Hansson and her friends.

Søren M. Borch, Copenhagen, Denmark
Mobile +45 2025 7667, soren.borch@gmail.com