[:en]The Samburu people are a semi-nomadic pastoralist group, numbering about 237,000 (in the Kenyan 2009 census)[1]. The vast majority live in the semi-desert in Samburu County in Northern Kenya, or in the surrounding areas. They have very positive attitudes towards their language, and use it virtually always where only Samburu persons are present.

The Samburu language is a Nilotic language[2] closely related to the many Maasai dialects (with 77-89 % lexical similarity), and to Ilchamus (with 88-94 % lexical similarity).[3] With regard to genetic affiliation, Ethnologue[4] describes the language as Nilotic (ultimately pertaining to the Nilo-Saharan phylum), Eastern, Lotuxo-Teso, Lotuxo-Maa, Ongamo-Maa.

[1] Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. 2013. Ethnic Affiliation. https://www.knbs.or.ke/?p=160

[2] Vossen, Rainer. 1982. The Eastern Nilotes: Linguistic and Historical Reconstructions. (Kolner Beitrage zur Afrikanistik, 9.) Berlin: Dietrich Reimer. Kohler, Oswin. 1948. Die nilotischen Sprachen. Darstellung ihres Lautsystems, nebst einer Einleitung uber die Geschichte ihrer Erforschung, ihrer Verbreitung und Gliederung. Ph.D.diss., University of Berlin.

[3] Sim, Ronald James. 1980. A sociolinguistic profile of Maasai-Samburu-Ilchamus language. Nairobi: SIL. ms.

[4] Simons, Gary F. and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2017. Ethonologue: Languages of the World, Twentieth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version: https://www.ethologue.com.[:de]

Introduction

The Example language is spoken by 5000 people living in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. This is the first attempt to compile a bilingual dictionary for the Example language. 10,000 words were collected by 30 speakers of the language in a 4 week Rapid Words Collection workshop. Then another month was spent in adding example sentences to many of the entries. There is still much work to do, but we, the compilers have decided to publish this work-in-progress, in order to document the work we have done so far. Our ambition is to publish early and often.

The Publishers

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