Bringing Languages into the Picture

It's a beautiful art form that tells stories and conveys messages. It's a clever form of expression that relies on rhythm, rhyme and meaning. It also contains important information that is usually intended for a present or future audience.

Singing is an art of oratory that should be preserved among the Batwa, as it could be one of the ways of safeguarding their lutwa dialect in the near future. According to research, there is a deep link between language and music, for example through the poetic narration that the Batwa make when they sing. This could contribute to a better understanding and survival of the Batwa musical heritage.

Academic investigation into the relationship of language and music has a deep and long history (neatly outlined by Feld and Fox, 1994). Up to the mid-1970s, research mostly centered on the possibility of applying linguistic models to musical analysis, and the overlap of musical and linguistic phenomena: the musical properties of speech, for example, or the relationships between song structure, texts, and poetics (Feld, 1974). These fields of investigation have continued to develop, but since the 1980s they have expanded to include broader aspects of the language–music relationship, like the biological origins of language and music and their relative functions in the survival of our species. In these later studies, research from other disciplines, such as anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience, has significantly contributed to our understanding of the language–music equation.

Read more about Music Endangerment: How Language Maintenance Can Help