does not appear to be something which will happen soon, we will have to make the most of what is currently available. Personally we believe that despite the many failures of our test procedures, the
adjusted results provide a generally close preliminary indication of what the overall intelligibility landscape within the Berta language area currently looks like.
Table 3: Adjusted Intelligibility Percentages with two lowest score-takers removed Maiyu Fadashi
Undulu Beleje
Gonfoye Maiyu Children-Abramo
100 58.3
34.9 54.3
Maiyu Adults-Menge 100
80.0 59.8
53.4 Fadashi-Bambassi
90.9 100
73.0 78.1
Undulu-Undulu 98.2
86.6 100
96.9 Beleje Gonfoye-Fwafwate
32.0 59.9
61.6 100
Table 4: Adjusted Intelligibility Percentages all score takers Maiyu Fadashi
Undulu Beleje
Gonfoye Maiyu Children-Abramo
100 55.9
34.9 48.7
Maiyu Adults-Menge 100
83.1 69.7
64.0 Fadashi-Bambassi
86.9 100
71.7 85.6
Undulu-Undulu 99.1
86.9 100
100 Beleje Gonfoye-Fwafwate
29.0 59.6
67.4 100
4.3 RTT results: Interpretation
One indication of the potential reliability of these statistics is that they tend to fit together well with other factors like lexicostatistic percentages, geographical proximities, and socio-linguistic attitudes. The
first observation is that, despite the small sample taken from Maiyu children, we see that age is a significant factor in intelligibility. The Maiyu adults scored considerably higher than the children did for
dialects other than their own, and although this is to be expected based on gradient levels of language contact, it is a factor that should be considered by the school system as they develop curriculum
materials. Another interesting observation is that the Maiyu adults who were tested for the RTT were from Menge, which is geographically closer to Undulu than to the Fadashi area. Despite this, their scores
were almost 13 higher for Fadashi than for Undulu, which coincides nicely with the lexical similarity percentages that we see between those groups.
Second, these results show that although non-Maiyu groups may not have positive attitudes towards the Maiyu variety, they tend to understand it well. Obviously Beleje Gonfoye is a glaring exception to
this, but both Undulu and Fadashi speakers tested very well in Maiyu, a statistic which buttresses the cases for choosing Maiyu as a standardized variety for mother-tongue materials. Materials developed in
Maiyu will not be extensible among the Beleje Gonfoye speakers, however, and based on the low intelligibility levels as well as the low percentage of lexical cognates, those two varieties are perhaps best
considered separate languages rather than dialects. In terms of directionality, several generic observations can be made. First, Fadashi speakers
understand Maiyu slightly better than Maiyu speakers understand Fadashi. Intelligibility levels tend to be high for both communities, but language attitudes suggest a very important sociological division. Maiyu
speakers make up an estimated 70 percent of the Berta population, and their historic political supremacy as well as their innovative tendencies and heavy borrowing from Arabic all combine to make Maiyu
speakers apprehensive towards using Fadashi or any other variety. On the other hand, we got the
impression that both Undulu and Beleje Gonfoye identified more with speakers of Fadashi than with Maiyu, although the intelligibility levels alone do not reflect these socio-linguistic attitudes.
Little is known about the history of the Undulu variety. The region where it is spoken is quite well known among both Maiyu and Fadashi because of its proximity to a known gold digging site. Towards
the end of the dry season February to April, people from the larger dialect communities come to the surrounding areas around Undulu to look for gold. High levels of exposure to other dialects are probably
behind why people surveyed from Undulu had the highest RTT results compared to any other group. Presumably, other dialect groups do not gain the same level of exposure to Undulu, since there were
no communities that tested well for that speech variety. Interestingly, however, a 67-year old Fadashi man scored a near-perfect score on the Undulu test, which suggests a generational shift in the Undulu
region. This hypothesis fits well with other observations, since there were many instances during the wordlist collection in which the younger Undulu members present defaulted to the knowledge of the
seniors in their midst. This same man also supplied the text for the RTT, and he asked us to re-record it, since the first recording was said to have had many non-indigenous terms in it. It is believed that the
Undulu variety as it appears in the collections of this survey is in the process of dying out and being replaced with a mix of Maiyu, Fadashi, and Arabic.
In terms of the RTT results, Beleje Gonfoye is the most extreme variety surveyed. Participants from this area did not score well on any of the RTTs, but the Maiyu test was the worst by far. We had multiple
participants respond to the Maiyu RTT with a synopsis “This is not my language,” and it is the only test which produced a score of 010. Apart from a handful of Maiyu speakers’ comments on Undulu, this was
the only variety which generated such a strong reaction. As stated earlier, a follow-up RTT should be conducted among the Wabosh to determine whether the degree of difference between these communities
can be bridged through exposure to Maiyu.
4.4 Sentence test results
