 Okay, welcome everyone. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Joey Lefstrand. I'm a postdoctoral research fellow at SOAS, University of London. And in today's webinar for the linguistics department, we will be discussing a film called What a Babel was just a myth with us today, three of the creators of the film. The film centers around Florian's work in language documentation of a language called Lull spoken in a village called Gory in southern Chad. And it also treats topics like language endangerment and multilingualism as well. So the three participants with us in our panel today who worked on creating this film includes Sandrine Long, who is an African ethnomusicologist and associate professor in the department of music at the University of Paris. Florian Lyonnais, who is assistant professor of linguistics at Princeton University, and Remaji Renati, who is scientific director of the Centre de Recherche en l'intercologie des sciences humaines, or Crash in Germain. So thank you to all of you for joining us. I will say just a word about this our topic is also about multilingualism, the panelists who are multilingual might choose to express themselves in other languages as well. So if we do get some discussion in French with our Francophone panelists will try to maybe do some translation by committee or summary for those who may not speak French but of course feel free to use other languages to express yourselves as well in this discussion. So I wanted to have a few questions that I've prepared to get the conversation going but of course other participants will be free to ask their questions as we move along this discussion as well. So let me start with the question for Remaji. Not everyone is following the news in Chad, but in the last month or so it's been quite a dramatic turn of events as the president unexpectedly lost his life. There's been a military committee taking over and has been a transition government so it's been quite a, let's say an unexpected and somewhat destabilizing time and Chad right now. Since Remaji we know you're there now in Jemena maybe I wonder if you could just say a few words about what the situation is like in Jemena now. How these turns of events have sort of affected the way people are living their lives and maybe if you have any sense of how it's affecting people outside of the capital city in areas like the village of Gory to these kind of events affect the lives of people with that chat or what's the situation in Chad like now. Okay. Thank you Joey. And thank you for all the participants. I think, yeah, as everybody might have been following on the news. Since some weeks, actually, we are living a situation that is quite unstable. We are living at the same time, not something very new for this country, because those kind of situation we couldn't are the rebellions attack to other desert heading to Jemena is nothing very new. And before getting to the actual situation. I would like to establish a link with this research and the situation you know with those rebellions. And one time with the Florian on the field while, and this time, our colleague, someone couldn't join us, we have been obliged to leave the field and to get back to the city, because the zone we were doing this very research where the zone that was also occupied by a country that at that time was not really very visible, but they were a tough action of the state on those levels, trying to expect them from that zone and we have been obliged, as we could say in French collateral they got to leave the space. And so, as a researcher, living in a country like Chad, I mean we always get to establish a link with the situation and our work actually. So the situation here since some, some weeks is that we got a, what is clearly a military coup d'etat, the son of the late president taking over the power. And as to doing a military transitional council, suspending the constitution and all the institutions. So it's clearly a data, but when this happened there was to approach to that situation here in Germany. And the source is about the majority of the population in the country, and mostly the youth that have seen what was happening as an opportunity for a real change, in terms of new governance to come in the country, new people to govern the country, and new people could really, or could let the democracy happen in this country, as these have been promising 30 years. And this is one side. And on the other side, we got the close circle of the late president, mainly the family, the planning circle, but also the political client of the late president and the former ruling party, that at the contrary saw no opportunity for change but struggled as they could, in order to keep the system going. So this is why, before announcing the president that have built up negotiations within the plan to establish a kind of continuity. And actually, what we see when comparing the two approach is that the majority of the people that have been hoping for a change are mainly the youth and they have been on the street demonstrating and trying, you know, as to struggle for a real change to happen. But the demonstration have been very toughly repressed with more, actually more than 10 people who died during the demonstrations. And so we see that, although the president passed away, the system is still here. And this is due to many, many factors. The first, I would say is the silence of the international community. And ironically, we have been comparing, you know, how the national community here, the African Union, mainly, but also regional organizations like the Central African States organization, but also the biggest partner of chat to in France, they have been very lose a losing on what was going on in chat, and we see that they have been in some way supporting the transitional or the unconstitutional take over at the head of the country, compared to Mali, to what happened in Mali some some months ago, we have been here very shocked by this very loose position of all those institutions. And ironically, we saw yesterday that some something very close to what happened here happened again in Mali, and we saw that even there. The condemnations have been very fast and even tough than what happened here in the country. So to not to take more time, I would say that what happened in chat have offered an opportunity for the change, but we could see clearly that both are the international and also at the local, local level we saw that all is in the country in place for a continuity to mean an undemocratic system dominated by military and no other possibility for take over at the head of the state then going to the to the to the abs. So, actually, I think that what really up here is kind of disappointment, mainly from the you and the civil society and opposition parties, you know, about this lost of lost opportunity, and mainly against the communion and the as a supporter of what is happening. Over to you. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, can imagine it's, it's been difficult both being feeling like the international groups that you wanted to come see and bring change didn't do that. The practical difficulties of this sort of unexpected turn of events has has probably caused a lot of disruption. Not only in research but also in the people going about their daily lives their development their education, their economic activities. I know for Florian this has been a bit of a disruption as well as you're planning to be in Chad now actually and had to cancel those plans. So I'm sort of talking about the politics which maybe I'll be out of my depth into talking more about the linguistics. I want to ask you Florian a bit about how you got involved in your research with law, I think maybe for people who haven't done this kind of field work. It's hard to grasp just how long and complex the process can be a building the relationships the networks, the formal permissions you need the institutional support you need to be able to go and do this kind of research. So all is obviously intriguing as a language from sort of a linguistics point of view as an isolate language spoken by a small group of people, but how practically did you go from being a European graduate student to getting into this village and Chad and working with this group you know, safe and ethical and allowed you to do the kind of research that's shown in this film. Thanks for the question and thanks for organizing this discussion. So the project started in 2000 project officially started in 2011. So, exactly 10 years ago in May of 2011, but I went to the field before applying for funding this was funded by the dobes program of the folks wagon foundation so documentation of the dobes program that the folks wagon foundation had until 2012 I think we were one of the last projects funded. And before I applied I needed of course to write the application to have a lot of very precise information in there to show that I knew what I was talking about. So I needed to make sure that I contacted people belonging to the loud speaking community to make sure that they were interested in the project and to see what was possible. And so I went to Chad, one year before the project was accepted a few months before the application deadline and I visited the villages. We didn't know how to get to the villages I didn't know how to get in contact with people so I decided to go to the closest town, which is south and southern Chad 150 kilometers south of the villages, hoping that there would be at least pupils in schools, students in schools that I could maybe contact to get in touch with loud speakers people from the region from the villages. So I went to one of the main high schools in Chad which happens to be the high school that our colleague here went to. And asked the director, do you know of anyone from those villages from the area he told me I didn't even know they existed so I'll try to send somebody around the classrooms to ask around but I'm not too hopeful. He did and two days after that we met again and he told me I did not we did not find anyone any students in the school that knew of that area but the physical education teacher has a colleague in another high school that is from that village. And by the way here he is you can meet him right now I've invited him. And so I met with that person who indeed turned out to be the heir of the chieftainship of the village. And so I discussed my my project with him and said well here I am this is what I want to do on document the language. I'm interested in such and such questions because such and such reasons. What do you think, how should I proceed, can I meet people blah blah blah. And I was lucky enough to that the first person I met understood what my plan was because he'd been to school he had the relatively high level of formal education spoke French so we could communicate very easily. And so he said yeah we're interested. That's very good news for us. Here's my brother he will take you to the villages, whenever you want. And so two days after that I was in the village with his brother who turned out to be the chief of the village. And through him, I managed to meet the villagers to explain what I wanted to do what the project would consist in that it would be linguistics and history and anthropology and music. I had the idea already that I wanted it to be a multi disciplinary documentation project. And the. I of course spoke no law or no other language of the region at the time so I had to speak French and the chief who spoke French translated into law to the villagers and basically everybody seemed to be happy with the idea that there could be an international team of researchers coming to the village and working with them on their language. The first time I arrived the rebellion that I mentioned a few minutes ago was still going on the chief of this rebellious movement had been arrested a few months before I got to chat but the region had been turned upside down by military and people from the right bank of the river and go to is on the right bank of the river had been basically chased away from their villages and had been relocated or had relocated themselves in refugee camps on the other side of the river so when I got to the village I was not in the village but in the refugee camp and I thought, I'm coming here in a situation of distress proposing to write a grammar and a dictionary. This is not going to work. This is not something that people are going to be interested in, or even willing to listen to because they have so much more on their own right now. And people were actually very interested and very happy that for once someone was coming to their villages to know them basically into spend time with them and to be interested in them. So I had no difficulty in basically getting the community to say yes we're very interested in getting the representatives of the community in the two last speaking villages and in the town of start to sign a paper that I wrote in French that I had translated orally to the villages that basically said we are interested in this project, which is the consent form that I added to my grant application to show that I had been in touch with the community. So this is how I approached the community the first time, basically trying to find my way to the villages one way or another, and it ended up working quite well I was relatively happy with the people that I met first because it made it very easy for me to get to the villages. And some people at first were surprised by seeing a foreigner white person coming to their villages and pretending that they're they were interested in learning the language which no one else in the country is interested in even knowing about. But this suspicion didn't last long when they realized that what I was doing was actually indeed learning the language and speaking with them and sitting down with them to just learn the language. And some people must have found me strange for a little while, but they were like he's weird but that's fine. He's harmless. So that's basically how it the first encounter went. And then I came back so I came back to France and I applied for this grant I looked for colleagues to be the anthropologist and the ethnic music colleges to the team that's how I found me, how I find the first anthropologist who worked for the project for a year and then had to go and was replaced a year after that by energy. So that's how the team was assembled. And, and then we've been going back to Chad, nearly every year since 2010. And so the relationship with the villagers was built over time. We were very fortunate to always have a positive welcome that is there were never any problems with anyone in the village, or in the community living in town. And it was very interesting to see how we got to know each other. Over time, we got to know a few people better than others because they turned out to be more interested, or they were our neighbors in the village, how relationships developed over time. And the relationships you can see in the movie already. But of course the movie was shot in 2012 so nine years ago. And we've been going back every year ever since so many of these relationships have gone deeper since then. And I think a relatively high level of sort of initial investment for the project even begins and some risks because you actually don't know if any of these things are going to work. But in your case it seems like there's been a long term payoff, both in terms of the research you've been able to do but also the relationships you've been able to build in the mutual sort of enrichment, you know, out of that approach to looking at languages. So Sundarine Florian mentioned that he was looking for an anthropologist when you first heard about this project. What was your reaction I mean you're, you're, you're not really a linguist by training your what you do ethnomusicology you're interested in filmmaking. How, why did you accept to get involved in this project and why did you want to bring the idea of making a documentary into this project. Well, yes, I accepted the project. Thank you. Thank you, Joey for inviting us first of all, and for giving us the possibility to show the film to a lot of linguists. Yes, first of all, of course, I accepted immediately to participate to this project because it was very interesting for me. It was a region, a region I didn't know yet. And I had, in my previous research is I had worked in neither and book in a vessel, especially always in the silent northern region, these countries. So we were near the forest and it was the first time for me also to participate to a interdisciplinary program. It was used to to work alone and and to do my research in my on my side. And it is very exciting for me to to work with other speciality and other researchers on the same project. I immediately accepted the proposition of Florian, of course, and after that, I also very quickly decided that I wanted to, to make a film during this research program. But I separated the the worker at first I worked only on the documentation of the music, which was my real mission on the on this project. And it's only during the third fieldwork that I decided I decided to devote myself entire entire the film. And with a we worked with a female cameraman called Charlotte Krebs, who joined us for about six, five weeks, just for the shooting. And yeah, at the direction and also the shooting sometimes also the sound I made. Yes, the sound in the making a film in these conditions takes a lot of energy. We had no electricity, no permanent house. So I knew that I couldn't do my research and the direction of the film at the same time I needed to be totally immersed in the day to day process of making the film. And I devoted entirely about five weeks to the shooting. And regarding this process. At the very beginning, I'd rather imagine making a film about music, since it is my specialty. But very quickly, I realized that what was the most interesting in the in the village was its small scale multilingualism. Because, okay, for me it was really fascinating to to to observe this as a non language person. Because in the previous regions of Sahel in Africa, where I used to go. These regions are dominated by much larger languages. And multilingualism is also present there but rarely beyond three or four languages. So this situation was really new for me. And it made me realize suddenly that this this must have been the situation of all humanity before the emergence of centralized forms of power. And we've forgotten that we are inherently multilingual, multilingual, sorry. And it is what this small Chadian village reminded me. And I think I hope reminds us. So at the origin of the project. There is also the simple question, which is, well, which I was asked several times before my departure to Chad, young people that I met told me and sometimes also my students asked me, Oh, documenting a language spoken by 700 people. What is the point. Why, why do why to do that and why learn such a small language. So, and I realized that the loss of biodiversity in the world is currently as the center of many debates, but the general public is finally very little aware of the issues of loss of cultural diversity that affects especially small so called indigenous societies. And yet, the two are, of course, closely linked since the small minority societies, which yet to represent 5% of the world population, speak about 5000 of the world's 6500 languages, and they are also the guardians of 80% of the world's biodiversity. So it is, it was important for me to make a film that addresses the general public on these issues. And also, it was important to develop these issues with a different point of view of from what has already been done on the subject. And that is to say, and not to emphasize the spectacular dimension of such project. And it's not we didn't study a language that have only only a few speakers left, or it is not a film, which focuses only on the linguist at the new adventurer of the 21st century. So it was important for me not to emphasize this, this aspect, spectacular aspect and to show the real work, the real relationship with them with the people of the villages of the village and and, and also, of course, what is at state when we document a small language. Thank you so much. So, you came into this project a bit later than the others to fill in for an anthropologist. I wonder if you could say a bit about what your role in the project was, but I'm also curious, because I know your background is an anthropology but more focused on economics and politics and not really on languages of rural lifestyles. So, how this project impacted you as the anthropologist, as well as how you can just say a bit about how this project impacted you as well as how you Okay. It's quite broken up but I can hear you a bit so let's let's try to hear your response and see how it goes. Okay, so I'll try and you let me know if you're not having me. So, I mean, when I, when I heard about this project, you know, I was sitting in high in Germany, doing my PhD so I received the two hours. And when I read that I want to read them I was very happy because I mean, the project was taking me back home. And I mean, back home, not just to chat but especially in my home town. And what was surprising for me was that I didn't, I never heard about this language, this language. And so I was excited to join the project first. Yeah, I mean, to know about, you know, what is this language and what are those people that actually I just know some 700 speaking this language. This was one. And the second is also the methodology that was proposed for the project as an anthropologist I didn't get any opportunity, you know, to go for this kind of field works that take you to those new places out of the urban sites and bring you in a society where you could like, you know, get more time, come to know people, come to know how they live etc. Because for my PhD I've been working on oil, meaning this is something that has more to do with cities and with the economic ecology. So this was an opportunity for me really getting back to what I call traditional anthropology, getting to know a society and to describe as I was really excited going there. And which saw the team was already on the field. And then, when I meet the first representative of the people, I come to see that they were people that I grown up with, without knowing that they are from this very, very group that we will be working about. And that was kind of, you know, a very surprise and this made the excitement more, more higher than from the beginning. And then I really appreciate the field for me it was about my job. And doing my job means learning a new language, but it also means learning new things and people that I, I have thought I know but that I really didn't know. One of the things that made things easier for me was the language aspect of the thing is that the people there could speak even my native language while I was to start learning their own language so I could from the first day start my work without waiting, without sometimes needing any translation. The first thing is how we managed to connect and within the team. And on top of this, I try to do my work in a way that I could always help Florian grow further in learning the language, working on the dictionary, discovering new words, discovering new expressions, and also connecting for her to work more deeper on other aspects like cultural, more cultural aspects like musical aspects, etc. So I think from the beginning, what really makes the project special for me, as I said is the opportunity going forward. The excitement learning something that was very close to me, without being really close to me because I didn't know about, but also how the whole team fit together. And as a child and anthropologist, getting opportunity to combine this team and getting the opportunity to alter what will be one of the only one monograph on these people, I mean this is something for me this is a very big achievement. Because you know the place here, most of the people they don't know. Anthropology in this country is very new actually we are less than five PhD anthropologists here and the Department of Anthropology has been open since less than 10 years. So it means that I mean it's a it's a big field, and being getting the opportunity, you know, to contribute with a monography. This might be the first monography by Italian. So this is something I'm very excited about. Thank you. That's very interesting how aspects of the project were very familiar and closely but other things were surprising and new so there was sort of a mix of things that made it easy for you but also things that made it interesting. I'm sure your contribution from your chatting perspective was invaluable both on the linguistics and the anthropology, even how this was filmed. I have a list of further questions, but I also want to open it up to anybody else who wants to ask a question so if you do want to ask a question. Feel free to either put that in the chat and I can read it out, or you can use the raise hand function, and I'll ask you to unmute and turn off your video turn on your video if you would like to ask a question. While you're thinking or writing your question that I'll go ahead and ask another one, and then see what questions come in. I wanted to ask a bit about since we mentioned already that this film began almost 10 years ago, and sort of a lot has changed over there especially in terms of linguistic scholarship. I think in certain ways, this film was ahead of its time in the focus say on small scale multi-lingualism. That seems to have become a much larger emphasis, particularly in connection to language documentation and language endangerment. So I think in that way this film is sort of ahead of its time. In other ways aspects of the film might seem a bit dated. In particular some of the statistics around language endangerment and some of the vocabulary used to talk about language endangerment. Would any of you like to comment on what things maybe you've learned in the process while you're making this films what things you might change if you were to start over and do it again. So yeah there are these are two aspects to the most important aspects of the movie the question of multilingualism and the question of language endangerment, which have to do with the fact that as Sandra said earlier that she was impressed by the small scale multilingualist situation in the village and really was interested in it and inspired by it to actually make a movie. So the movie is mainly about multilingualism, but the justification of the project was language endangerment because it was funded by a program that basically gave money to people who were willing to document and engage in languages, and I had to prove one way or another and we could discuss the criteria at length that the language was endangered in order to get the money and do the work. And so, since Sandra wanted to show the team at work. The question of language endangerment came into play and had to be displayed in the movie. It was the movie was entirely shot in 2012. So it was only released in 2019 because something was very busy and it took a long time to finalize the movie. But indeed, at that time, the linguists of the movie me, I was a young graduate student and what I knew about language endangerment was what you could read in the literature of the time. And what you heard everywhere what you still hear pretty much everywhere today, despite the fact that more and more linguists working on these topics are updating the conversation regularly. And one of these updates of course is the number of languages that are threatened so you still read pretty much everywhere, including on the UNESCO website that 50 to 90% of the words languages will be extinct by the end of the century. We've been saying that for 2030 years now turns out that all the languages that should have died by now are still alive or not all of them but many of them are still alive and so it seems that the rate of disappearance if that is even the right term to use the rate of basically language loss is much slower than initially thought which of course is great news, even though the rate is still too fast. It's not a pity that we're losing the languages but instead of losing two languages per month which was about the estimate 1520 years ago, we think that we're on average losing three to four, perhaps five per year which is much fewer languages. So that's definitely one thing that we would update this discourse about how languages how many languages are endangered would definitely be updated. There are other aspects that I guess can come as disappointing points for linguists in particular linguists working in language documentation and on the question of language endangerment, or however you want to call it language dormancy, all this research basically on how languages at some point may stop being passed on to the next generation, because it is not the goal is not to make a scientific movie. It's a scholarly article with images. It really was intended to be a movie, and it was intended to touch a broad as broad as possible abroad public and so to sensitize people to the question of language endangerment with the few pieces of information that were available and widely available at the time so there are aspects that that are not developed in depth in the movie but there was no room for that in a 56 minute movie. That's, we still hope that the movie is a good point of departure for discussions on those questions on the question of the link between language and culture for example which is an extremely complex one which, of course is very very is not fully covered in the movie, but at least a reflection of what you lose culturally speaking or don't lose when you lose a language. So, these sorts of questions for another aspect that is present in the movie but we don't discuss is the political aspect, I guess, which has become, which is now at the forefront of discussion about language endangerment which perhaps was not the idea that languages are not endangered because of invisible forces but that there are political forces at work that create situation in which it is difficult to transmit languages or to practice once languages or to transmit once language or languages to the next generation. I didn't discuss this overtly in the movie but you can see aspects of what's driving potential language endangerment in Chad and in other countries such as Chad. You can see that in the fact that school is entirely in French, which is the colonial language and is the one of the two official languages and the main language of education and Chad formal education. You can see in the village that the children just repeat words in French that the, that the teacher shows them without understanding a word of what they're saying. You also see that people in town speak French, and the interviews are in French in town but they don't they're not in French in the village because in the village virtually no one speaks French. You can see someone at the end of the movie say, I want my children to abandon the traditional culture, I want them to be good Muslims because without Islam there's no future, which is also of course something we don't elaborate on but this is definitely a political force at work socio political force at work in cultural slash linguistic change potential cultural slash linguistics, linguistic changes. So these aspects are are basically present as points of departure for discussion on these topics. Regarding this very last word before I let people ask questions regarding the question of multilingualism it is true and we didn't realize that when something was working on the movie. Because that literature did not exist really at the time people were already researching and having ideas about this but publications have not yet. The impact that they've had now about small scale mental lingualism. Of course I read Frédéric Lucas work on small scale mental lingualism in the context in the one of the possible African contexts that have Kazama's in this case. Also Jeff Goods and Kierpaolo de Carlos work on the lower fungham in Cameroon, and I gave a talk recently about small scale multilingualism, taking examples from gory and the language and what the situation is in that particular part of Chad. Everything every and in that talk I summarize the literature and what has been said about the socio economic conditions that allow for small scale multilingualism to exist to continue to be perpetuated, and that allows for small languages to be passed on to the next generations and villages. And I realized that I had in the movie in somebody's movie, a clip illustrating every one of these criteria. You have the way children are raised, not raised just by their parents but by the entire village to go a little fast on the details, which exposes them to all the languages spoken in the village from a very young age. That's illustrated in the movie, the attachment of people with to all the languages that they speak their linguistic repertoire this woman who likes the six languages that she speaks and only death can make you abandon the languages that you speak and she wouldn't be able to choose the language that she prefers over the other ones which is also one characteristic of small scale multilingual societies where people are value multilingualism and like the proud of their linguistic repertoire and so on and so forth so to a large extent yeah these studies and theoretical notions about small scale multilingualism happened to be illustrated in the movie just because that's what something focused on when she shot the movie and when she actually chose the images to show in the movie. And also marriage relationships. And which leads the women to leave their village to go in other villages. Yeah so lots of lots of points of departure there are things that I guess anybody who sees their, their academic topic being treated in a popular film will have some kind of criticism or wanted to be further developed. But maybe you could say something about how non academics have reacted to the film, and then have you shown the film the chatty and so how chatty it's reacted to the film have you got the kind of conversations that you were hoping to get from the chat. How have you got the kind of conversations as well. Yes, I can jump in. Could you hear me Joe. Okay. I mean, yes. We, we got the opportunity to show the film. Yeah, I can jump in. I think that we'll see the details when Remaji writes his response I think what Remaji wanted to say is that the response that chatty and viewers gave was different from the responses that western audiences, which is a very interesting point indeed. So, I'm just talking about the reaction from people in Gemina, we showed the show the movie in Gemina. But I also went to the villages last the capital city of China we should. Oh yeah the capital city of Chad, we showed this in the basically French cultural center, and we invited everyone that wanted to come, which included people from the university expats students community members loudspeakers, and I unfortunately couldn't be there because it was Kobe times and I had left the country with the last flight back to France the day before. Oh, here's his answer. Do you want me to read it out maybe. That's another question coming in. I'll go with your answer and then I'll read his next and then we'll go to the next question. But, so this is one type of reaction people chatting people who are not members of the community but I also went to the villages last year in February and showed the movie to the villagers in Gori in downtown which is the other village, but also in in town to the community to the last speaking community in town and in the villages and, of course, the reactions we got were very different. One of the problems showing this movie in the village is that most of the discussion that takes place in the in my interview and in the what Sunday and says in the movie about the multilingual situation about language endangerment is in French and so people in the village in their vast majority don't really understand French and can't really participate in that so that's part of the movie they're not getting, but a lot of that is also illustrated in the interviews in of villagers so the relationship of villagers with their languages questions about multilingualism question about language endangerment questions questions about moving to town, why would you want to move to town and so on and so forth these things take place in and so there's a lot of the movie that is still very much available for discussion and thinking, but the reactions that we got were mostly reactions about seeing themselves in the movie seeing people they know in the movie, thinking back about what took place in the village, about nearly 10 years ago. So a lot of reactions about a lot of the old people that we see in the movie died since 2012. Most of the old people we see in the movie are not with us anymore and so that of course was also parts of the reactions that we got by people being reminded of the existence of those people and that was an important part of the reactions. So the direct the reactions we got from the villages were not so much about multilingualism about those that sort of issues but more about the way they appeared in the movie. Reactions we got from people in downtown the other village we don't really see images from that other village because we never had the time to shoot images in the other village. So of course the react the first reaction we got is why are why are we not in the movie, which the villages said half jokingly of course, because they knew why they weren't there but but of course that's something they had to say. But overall, there was a lot of laughter during the screening of the movies in the two villages, including in town people were extremely happy to see the movie to see the result of this work. They were extremely happy to see their village on a screen in a professional movie. And yeah laughter was was the most common reaction to mostly every scene and interestingly people didn't laugh at the same junctures as humans as other audiences outside of the villages because of course they laughed at things that would make only a villager laugh because they know the context they know the people and so on and so forth so that was another interesting aspect of the reactions we got from the villagers but everyone asked to have a copy of the movie, which we're still working on because the movie is too heavy to fit on memory cards that go into cell phones. The next time I go back to chat I'll go back with memory cards and low definition version of the movie so everybody can have it and show it to everyone they want. And clearly it was obvious they were very happy about it and very proud of being the object of such a movie so that made me very happy to see that. Sandrine did you want to add anything any reactions you've had to the film. No it's okay. I said everything. We got a question from our participant Patricia is asking if you can give a brief update on the documentation process. What are the existing or future plans for the project or what happened since you know you stopped filming for this movie. The stuff you did there that I know you started a new project with them and so maybe you want to talk a bit about that but what's been going on in terms of the language documentation and research since this was filmed. So we, the project is officially over in the sense that the funding period has ended and there aren't any funds anymore for the project so it's lasted officially from 2011 to the end of 2019 we managed to stretch the funding over seven years. Eight years actually, but it had started a year before and I'm going back to chat and every time I go back to chat I go back to the villages for a few days now only but I keep having things to check with the people I keep having a few things to do there so the documentation is ongoing I would say although now I document a lot less because I have a lot less work, a lot less time actually to spend in the villages. I collected. I don't remember how many hours of recordings. Over 100 and something hours of texts, about 15% of which are fully transcribed and translated and glossed and grammatically analyzed. Maybe 30% are somewhat annotated there's at least a vague translation or a transcription or an attempt at transcribing. So we collected hours of recordings of music sound Sunday collected a lot of music and dance. So we have a lot of hours of music and dance, including of musical practices and dances from other groups in the region because this is a highly multilingual area. And it's also an area where there are nomadic full Bay and nomadic Arabs in like near the village who keep passing through the village and so we were often invited to weddings and ceremonies in other communities where something also shot images of people dancing dances that had nothing to do with what we were doing in the village so we have a collection of recordings from the region. And we have a, I don't even know how many thousands of pictures that are not yet archived because it's so many pictures that I really would like to give titles to so that they're not just pictures with pictures with the documentation so this is an ongoing process of archiving all the pictures but we have a huge archive that is now entirely online and entirely open access. So this archive, which is online curated by the Max Planck Institute of Cycle Linguistics in Neimechen in the Netherlands, and all of our recordings, I would say that 95% of what we recorded is online we still have about 5% to go through and upload. And it's all freely available, freely downloadable with the consent of the speakers and the community of course. I did get a new grant new funding to basically do the same thing on another language of Southern Chad spoken 100 and something kilometers further east. And so that's what my efforts and the images efforts are focused on now. I am in Chad, I always find a week to go back to gory and dump that visit the people and spend time with them because I mean, many of them have become become friends and people I cannot go to chat without visiting. So it's likely that I will continue working on the language that I will continue documenting to a certain extent that I will continue trying to get texts that we recorded transcribed and translated. Everything that we haven't had the time to do to annotate we're going to try and I'm going to try and basically bring a little work every time that I go to chat find a few people who are willing to work with me and continue transcribing and translating. Thanks. We have another question from our participant you want to unmute yourself and ask your question. Yes, hello, I'm sorry I was very late now because I have been at another meeting there's so many zoom meetings, but I have a question I absolutely loved your video. So I have seen it twice. It's fantastic. And I'm working with multilingualism and language acquisition so that's not really maybe your, your top interest but it is one of your interest I'm sure. And I would like to quote some things about how they talked about how easily the children go in and out from between languages and how early they learn them and do you have any publications I can quote. Not yet, but I would like to publish a summary of the multilingual situation in the village in the region. With the most up to date descriptive tools that people have developed in particular Frederica loops cause framework of small scale multilingualism and try to see what this brings to the understanding of the local situation and what the local situation has to tell us about how we might want to change or adapt a few aspects of this theory. So there will be something at some point. I suppose you could cite the movie. Yes. Yeah, that's that's the only thing that is out there right now that you can cite yeah. Yeah, I will do that. If you want original loud texts. So not just the French translation and the subtitles of the English translation subtitles you can just contact me and I'll give you the loud texts printed and transcribed and glossed if you want. Wow, yeah, I will send you an email. Okay. Great. Thank you. One more question and this may be your last question as a running out of time. And you're asked about multilingualism in the village and how prevalent chatty and Arabic is you don't really hear in the film and I guess it's not as common in the in the south of chat is other places but it is the little bit franca for most of Chad, but it doesn't seem to really be featured in the film. I would say that it was probably not spoken by a lot of people 30 years ago that it was probably not spoken by women 30 years ago by many women. I think that all men in the village speak Chad in Arabic, to what extent I don't know maybe not full bilingualism but communication communication level Chad in Arabic, and most women probably have some competence in Chad in Arabic as well. Most all the people who leave the village and travel, all the people who live in town, definitely speak Chad in Arabic. All the people who've been to town and come back to the village and spend the rest of their lives in the village of course speak Chad in Arabic to it is not a language that people use among themselves. It's very very rare to see that, except for some people who have spent most of their lives in town and are more comfortable in Chad in Arabic than in Laos, in which case, sometimes some conversations will be in Chad in Arabic but that's very very rare. It's so rare that I basically did not have to learn Chad in Arabic to do my work, because I learned Laos faster than I learned Chad in Arabic because Laos was more important for me to learn and so as soon as I was fluent in Laos, in my own broken version of Laos, that was enough to communicate with the people and I did not need to learn Chad in Arabic which means that now that I'm doing fieldwork in another village where the language situation is different I have to relearn entirely a new language and I can't use Chad in Arabic which is a pity because that would be, that would be a good thing to be able to do. But yeah, so Chad in Arabic is becoming more and more prevalent but not to the point of being a threat to local languages, for example, it is definitely a fifth or sixth language. Children respond to orders given to them in Chad in Arabic, but I've never heard a child speak in Chad in Arabic. And so my guess is that children just know a few expressions and words, but not more than that. That's great. Well, I think we've gone up to an hour now so we'll probably end it there. I didn't see any more questions from our participants. So let me end just by saying thank you to Florence and Dream and Benji for being available here today but also for doing your work in such a way that you've been able to share this film with all of us who see that not only, you know, is this film really for people interested in language documentation but because it's really focused on multilingualism. It seems to have attracted the interest of a much broader audience and hopefully will continue to spread the kinds of conversations that you are hoping to encourage when you are conceiving of the film and making it over this long process over all these years. So thanks for joining us and for sharing this film with us. Just perhaps to add the last thing. Yes, it's interesting to know that the film is now distributed by an American distributor called Ikaris, so you can find it on the website of Ikaris if the university or other university needs it. Okay. That's great. Thank you everyone. Thank you very much for organizing this that was great. Thank you very much to everyone who participated that was very nice. It's always nice to have conversations about these topics. And thank you to all of you. And it's a pity that we couldn't hear. Yeah, sorry about that connection problem. I'll go ahead and start recording now. Thanks everyone.