This semester, UC Berkeley students will have the opportunity to study a remote African language that has never been taught before­-at this university or anywhere else in the world.

Linguistics professor Larry Hyman suggested Nzadi, an obscure Bantu dialect spoken by a fishing community in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as the subject of his 10-person field methods course this fall.

A complete stranger to the language, Hyman said he has no information about the construction of the language except a 768-item word list.

"We're doing a language that not only has never been studied, it's never been mentioned in literature," he said. "It's like we discovered the language, almost."

Hyman said the purpose of such courses is to teach students how to learn a language that they have had no previous exposure to if working or conducting research in another country.

To aid Hyman and the students in understanding Nzadi, native speaker Simon Tukumu, who met Hyman through a mutual friend, will be lecturing during most classes. Tukumu is pursuing a masters degree at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley after recently being ordained a Jesuit priest.

"It's unusual to find a language that hasn't been mentioned before," Hyman said. "And it is extremely rare to find a speaker of such a language in Berkeley, or even in the United States for that matter."

Tukumu said Nzadi was the native language along the border of the Kasai River, where he lived with his parents until two years ago.

"In my village, most of our people went to fish," said Tukumu, one of only a few thousand speakers of Nzadi in the world.

While some students could be intimidated by the lack of outside research on the language, senior Dillon Mee, who is taking the class, said the prospect of studying a virtually undiscovered language was appealing.

"It's very exciting in the sense that everything is new so even though we're just undergraduates, we're basically kind of on the cutting edge of this language," Mee said.

Another student in the class, Junior Chad Hegelmeyer, said he thinks having no prior knowledge of the language would be beneficial.

"We don't know what's on the road," he said.

By the end of the semester, Hyman hopes that as a class, they will be able to assemble a grammar book with the new information they will have learned.

"Each student will be responsible for a chapter," he said. "So the idea is that at the end, I'll take each term paper and staple them together to create a book."

Hyman said his colleagues have encouraged his efforts, despite the budget cuts that have affected other classes.

"Everybody's envious of what I'm able to do with this," he said. "Really, we're putting this language on the map."

Tags: LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO