A Ball State University doctoral student plans to embark on a journey to Nairobi, Kenya, this month so he can study and help develop the unfamiliar language Sheng.
Philip Rudd received a Fulbright-Hays grant that will fund his trip, during which he intends to discover whether Sheng, a Kenyan dialect, is a Swahili-English code or a mixture of languages.
The Fulbright-Hays grant is offered to students across the entire country, and Rudd heard about the grant from the U.S. Department of Education and decided to apply.Of 516 applicants, only 160 students were chosen to receive funding for the study abroad program. Rudd said the main reason he decided to apply for the grant was because of his volunteer experience and strong background in the study of linguistics. Linguistics is the study of human language and what all languages have in common, according to Rudd.
“I have written papers discussing the language of Swahili-Sheng and have taught in Kenya as a Peace Corps volunteer teacher,” Rudd said. “The existence of mixed languages has only recently been acknowledged. Therefore, an analysis and description of Sheng will contribute to the study of contact languages in general and in Kenya in particular.”
Rudd will be studying the African urban vernacular to create a preliminary grammar in Sheng.
He explained that while elementary education in Kenya is free, secondary education is not. He wants to help students learn their education in Sheng, which he said he feels is necessary. While in Kenya, Rudd will record conversation not only among students but also between normal, everyday people on the streets. He will then take what he has recorded and translate it to come up with this particular Sheng grammar.
Rudd is readily looking forward to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, he said.
“Language has a great influence on people’s self-perceptions,” Rudd said.His future goals include bringing his research and studies from Africa here to America to teach American students the importance of languages and how languages have more in common than people tend to realize.
Growing up in Doniphan, Mo., Rudd said he always knew he was “naturally drawn to literature and language studies.”
Rudd was the first member of his family to graduate from college. He earned his master’s degree from Southeast Missouri State University and then came to Ball State University to work on his Ph.D. in applied linguistics.
Ball State offered Rudd a graduate assistantship, and he accepted because he preferred the low student-teacher ratio, which would allow for more hands-on experiences, he said.
Rudd said Ball State has a prestigious program in the study of human languages. Upon coming to Ball State, he said he has since learned the science of linguistics, which has enabled him to appreciate “the language phenomenon of human beings.”
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