A language taken apart by administration, and now being written back down — word by word, from the people who still speak it.

What happened to it

Colonial boundaries placed Tachoni communities under different authorities and alongside different neighbours. Successive generations were schooled, counted and governed in someone else’s dialect. Olutachoni survived in the home and at the ceremony, and thinned everywhere else.

What remains is spoken, largely unwritten, and held mostly by people in their seventies and eighties. A language is not lost in a decade. It is lost in a funeral.

The lexicon

Every entry is recorded from a speaker, checked by a second, and kept with its pronunciation. Where a word has fallen out of daily use, we note who still uses it and where. Where two speakers disagree on a meaning, both are held.

These entries are provisional. They were drafted for the site and have not yet been confirmed by a first-language speaker. Do not cite them. If you speak Olutachoni and any of this is wrong, please tell us — that correction is worth more to the archive than the entry was.

Work we are not duplicating

Others have been at this longer. The Bible Translation & Literacy translation effort and the Lughayangu community lexicon both hold Olutachoni material. Where their work covers ground, we credit and link to it rather than reproduce it. The Trust’s contribution is the recorded audio and the elders’ own usage.

How to help

You do not need training. If you know a word your grandchildren do not use, that word is the work. Send it, or tell us who to visit.