Abuja: What if the most effective way to combat language endangerment is to empower community members to document their own languages? The Kam Language Project is an example of how community-led efforts can help preserve endangered languages. Kam (also known as Nyingwom) is a language spoken in 29 villages in the Bali Local Government Area of Taraba State in Nigeria. There are an estimated 8,000-11,000 Kam language speakers today. Like many other Indigenous languages in northeastern Nigeria, Kam received no attention from researchers before 2016. As a result, there was no written literature, dictionary, standardized orthography, or audiovisual recordings of the language that could be used for documentation and preservation. According to Global Voices, to preserve this language, Dr. Jakob Lesage, a linguist and lecturer at the Institute of Asia and African Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, started the Kam Language Project in 2016. Over ten years, he worked alongside Kam community members using what he calls a decentralized approach: Rather than parachuting in as an outside expert, he trained a language documentation team comprising 14 members of the Kam community. At the completion of the ten-year project in March 2026, the team had produced grammar reference material for the Kam language, a digital Kam dictionary, 307 recordings (audio and video), and a website dedicated to the Kam language. Lesage shared the story behind the documentation project with Abdulrosheed Fadipe via WhatsApp, stating that Nigeria has a striking combination of enormous linguistic diversity, major gaps in documentation, and communities eager for their languages to be studied and represented. About half of Nigeria's 500-plus languages have never received serious scientific attention-the highest proportion of undocumented languages anywhere in Africa. Lesage emphasized the urgency and excitement of the work, noting that studying a single undocumented language properly can overturn what is known about language classification, histo ry, and linguistics. Kam, belonging to the Niger-Congo family, does not fit neatly into any known subgroup, raising questions about its origins. Its unusual grammatical features can also shed light on broader linguistic debates. He also highlighted the meaningful nature of the work for the speakers of the languages, who desire their history recorded and their languages preserved. Lesage described Kam as locally stable but vulnerable, emphasizing the importance of documenting it while it is still in active, everyday use. Dr. Lesage's decentralized fieldwork model ensured that the Kam community was central to the documentation process. Kam team members were involved at every stage, from recording to transcription, translation, and deciding what was worth preserving-oral histories, local knowledge, and culturally important stories. Despite challenges such as COVID-19, which prevented Lesage from traveling to Nigeria, the project adapted by pivoting to remote training. Working with Elisha Yunana, a nearby comm unity member with documentation experience, they ran a two-week training for the Kam team, teaching them to use recording equipment themselves. The project faced logistical hurdles, such as equipment procurement and file-sharing issues, but these were overcome with creative solutions and the determination of the Kam team. The absence of a Kam writing system was addressed by trusting speaker intuitions and working through readability challenges. Lesage expressed pride in the accomplishments of the Kam team, emphasizing the importance of the project in preserving Kam's cultural and linguistic heritage. If Kam were to disappear, both the Kam world and the broader global community would lose valuable cultural expressions and insights into human language and culture.
