The Digital Mbay Language Project

This project creates a permanent digital record of Mbay, a Nilo-Saharan language of the Sara Group spoken in southern Chad. The data from Keegan et al's 1996 Dictionary of Mbay and from Keegan's 1997 A Reference Grammar of Mbay has been moved to a digital format that can be accessed from a DVD. Recordings from native speakers of Mbay are included for the vast majority of the words and illustrative sentences. Both the dictionary and grammar have been revised and expanded, and over 1,000 new illustrative sentences have been added. The language DVD includes the following components:

1. A database containing the Mbay dictionary language data.

2. The grammar in html format.

3. Illustrations and photos from the dictionary in JPG format.

4. Over 18,000 recordings of Mbay words, expressions, and sentences in MP3 format.

5. Language software that provides simple access to this information.
The user views the dictionary data page by page, and can click on words and sentences to hear them spoken by a native speaker. There are extensive searching capabilities, and access to the grammar, the help system, and other information is available from menus.

6. A project containing the dictionary data for use with the Summer Instititute of Linguistic's Toolbox program.

An accompanying booklet provides an introduction to the project, the Mbay language and the language software.

This language software has been tested with Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP. With Windows Vista, it has been tested on a single machine. It is not intended for use on Linux, Unix or any Apple OS's.