With positive affirmation on the workstation, the team keeps on with its investigation and categorization:
Three different reseachers, five different field trips and hundreds of different recordings needing systematizing. Aleksandra and Ilona face a huge amount of paperwork trying to bring the collected data into some kind of order and improve the labelling system. Of all the material collected so far, transcribing and finalizing the recorded sample texts and feature lists has priority. Ilona and Aleksandra subsequently pass their results to our cooperation partners from the Austrian Academy of Sciences for the data’s digital processing. At the same time, Aleksandra and Ilona start to write short articles about the sites they have been working at. These profiles expand the investigations’ linguistic focus sharing also some insights into the region, its people and some local cultural characteristics.
Franziska, meanwhile, finds herself back in Tunisia after just three weeks in Austria between the two trips. Strengthened by her positive experiences she continues the survey in the most southern part of the area to investigate the governorate of Gafsa. “People of the South” in Tunisia are renowned for their hospitality and warm hearts. Indeed, this reputation is fully deserved! Thanks to the support of the locals, Franziska conducts nomerous interviews in the capital Gafsa as well as in the small town El Guettar which is about 20 km to the south of the capital. She also gets in touch with people from the village Lala, located between these two cities. The researcher interviews people from the governorate’s eastern part, namely from the mountain region Bir Saad and the village Talah and went to the far west of the governorate of Gafsa, the commune of Redeyef and the town Moulares (Oum el Araies) to the north of it.
Three weeks after a great deal of exiting interviews and some exhausting marriages […], Franziska is back to El Kef. Although, the stay in this beautiful governorate is associated with some bureaucratic burdens, the investigation continuous very successfully:
Having finished the town of Tajerouine and its coutry side including Sbiat, Mahjouba, Kalaat es Senam and Sidi Mtir as well as the sites Smeena and Dir within the closer surrounding of El Kef, Franziska now focuses on the commune of Dahmani. Recording people in Shmeysiya and Maskhiya, both neighbouring Dahmani, but also in the mountain region Ain El Ksiba on the border to the governorate of Kasserine, she keeps on capturing dialectal varieties.
And then, there is still a surprise in El Kef: the opportunity to get in touch with some students from the Kasserine town of Sbiba, who are available for an interview too.
