2004 | France | Documentary

Le Dictionnaire (The Dictionary)

  • French - 23 mins
  • Director | Laurent Maget
  • Writer | Laurent Maget, Lolke Van der Veen
  • Producer | -

STATUS: Released

This film is currently not available.   

This film is the story of the meeting, in Gabon, of Sébastien Bodinga Bwa Bodinga and Lolke Van der Veen, a linguist. Indeed, in 1986 Sébastien Bodinga Bwa Bodinga had undertaken to create a lexicon of his language, Geviya, an oral dialect, in order to preserve its memory. This language is indeed threatened, because it is estimated that there are only about forty good speakers. He composes his life's work, a 1,300-page document. In 1988, Lolke Van der Veen was sent by his research director to work on the corpus thus collected. He immersed himself for several years in this work in order to give it an elaborate scientific form (definition of words, translation, numerous examples in context and grammatical categorizations). In January 2003, he officially brought Sébastien the first Geviya-French dictionary, a way of defending this culture. The delivery of this document gave rise to a real ceremony.

Documentary Linguistics Cultural Preservation Gabon Indigenous Languages Collaboration
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