and more notable than the first, regards the placement of the questions inserted into the RTT. In rather unorthodox praxis, back-to-back questions were inserted into longer sections of recorded texts. As a
result, listeners were required to temporarily retain more information than is typically common for an RTT, which explains the decreased average score for both mother-tongue speakers and non-mother-
tongue speakers. The figures presented for both target and recipient audiences are atypically low; however, they arguably provide a reliable relative reflection of intelligibility among Berta groups. The
intelligibility results are consistent with other tests like sociolinguistic observation and lexical similarity percentages. For a more in-depth treatment of how the results may correspond to the structure of each
test, please consult section 4.2 and its sub-sections.
3.1 Selection of data points
Before any testing could be done, it was first imperative to choose which reference varieties should be included in this study. As mentioned in the abstract, these specific speech communities were selected
based on previous reports compiled by varying sources. First, in addition to a number of other varieties spoken in Sudan, Bender 1989 is the first to identify all four of the communities surveyed here. He uses
primarily his own data, but the data from the Beleje Gonfoye community is borrowed from Fleming 1960 and 1974 who notably refers to the community as “Gebeto.” These four groups, Maiyu, Fadashi,
Undulu, and Beleje Gonfoye, were also selected as data sources for the Berta-Amharic-English Dictionary SIL 2007. Since the publication of the dictionary happened in conjunction with the same
commissioning institution as the survey the Ethiopian Bureau of Education, these four groups were deemed most appropriate for the investigation of literature extensibility. After the primary survey was
conducted, more information regarding the presence of two more groups emerged, namely the Wabosh and the Metehara. Wordlists were collected from these two communities, but the RTT and the sentence
repetition tests were not conducted in these areas. Local opinion determined which specific towns or villages were selected for sampling. Most Maiyu
speakers propose that there is near linguistic homogeneity within the large region which makes up much of the Asosa Zone, so the participants were selected from the two primary towns therein: Asosa and
Menge. Bambassi is the undisputed center of the Fadashi area, and so we sampled from both the town of Bambassi and a peripheral village 15 kilometers north of the town. The precise parameters of the
Fadashi area are unclear, however, Fadashi speakers are known to extend as far south as Begi, and nearly as far east as the town of Mendi. Speakers of the Undulu variety live in a rural town called
Undulu located about 70 kilometers northeast of Asosa. The homogeneity of this town is questionable; there appears to be a sizable number of non-Undulu speaking Berta living or working there who are not
originally from that area. Subsequently, selecting only those speakers who grew up speaking Undulu was not easy, as many people were eager to partake in the survey and may have fabricated their birth-ties to
that region. Notes collected via participant observation suggest a further complication, namely that there is extensive language shift occurring among the Undulu population.
The last community, the Beleje Gonfoye, are geographically isolated from the other Berta, residing in a peninsular region of Benishangul-Gumuz in the Didessa Valley. Those surveyed reside in a town
called Fwafwate, located about 25 kilometers northwest of the town of Arjo. Here there are several hundred perhaps as many as 1,000 Berta who speak the variety known as Gebeto or Beleje Gonfoye.
They have had very limited contact with other Berta in recent years and the linguistic record attests long-term separation.
A word regarding those communities not included in this survey is warranted. Shuru and Bake are two Berta dialects listed in the Ethnologue neither of which were incorporated into this study. Despite
research and personal contacts within the Maiyu community we were unable to pinpoint any probable locations for where these dialects are spoken. It is likely that these designations have variant names.
3.2 Survey instruments 3.2.1
