Gutob [gbj], also known as Gadaba or Bodo-Gadaba, is a highly endangered language of the Munda family spoken in Koraput District, Odisha (Orissa) State, India. There are roughly 5,000 – 8,000 Gutob speakers remaining, but this number continues to decline as speakers shift to Desia (and Ollari Gadaba), accelerated in recent years by large-scale hydro-electric developments that have disrupted the Gutob communities significantly.

Living Tongues researchers undertook the documentation of the Gutob language thanks to award no. 1500092 from the National Science Foundation: “Documentation of Gutob, an endangered Munda language of India.” This support is gratefully acknowledged.

The collected language documentation materials include an extensive lexical and grammatical collection in the form of recorded words, phrases, and oral texts. Over 13,000 of the collected Gutob words were compiled into the first-ever online Gutob Talking Dictionary.

The Gutob words and phrases in the Gutob Talking Dictionary were collected, edited, annotated and transcribed by Gregory D. S. Anderson with help from researchers Opino Gomango and Bikram Jora, speakers Bondu Kirsani, Tankadhar Sisa, Kamla Sisa and Radha Kirsani, as well as field assistants Gajendra Pradhan, Sujesh Gomango and Satosh Padni.

One of the entries found in the Gutob Talking Dictionary is “sukub” (gourd spoon). In the video above, a Gutob community member named Mr. Mukund Kirsani climbs a tree to retrieve his palm wine using his sukub. The production of palm wine is an important part of Gutob daily life. This video takes place in the village of Gangare ngom and was filmed by Living Tongues project coordinator Opino Gomango. View this video on our Facebook page. 

The entries in the Gutob Talking Dictionary dictionary were also archived as part of a larger Gutob collection housed at PARADISEC. The Gutob collection was organized and archived by Anna Luisa Daigneault for Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. The transcriptions, recorded materials and dictionary database spreadsheet are all included in the official archival deposit for this project. Explore the Gutob archive on PARADISEC

For all of the lexical and grammatical content, the associated master list and all transcriptions are included in the deposit. For many of the recorded grammatical elicitations, as well as many of the video and audio recordings of oral texts, the relevant ELAN annotations are also included (in .EAF format).

Assistance with digitizing the annotations using the ELAN software was provided by the following volunteers: Katie Li, Shelby Sands, Murilo da Silva Barros, Henry Wu, Hannah Bishop, and Michael Horlick, Dylan Charter, Dave Prine, Theresa Usuriello, Juhyae Kim, Edward Hess, Amatullah Brown, Zainah Asfoor, Gillian Gardiner, Virginia Vázquez, Sarah Agou, Charis Nandor, Corinne Van Ryckeghem, Leena Dihingia, Thorin Engeseth, Priyanka Pradeepkumar, Wojciech Zeyland, Jacquelyn Duffy, Vasiliki Moutzouri, Durgesh Rajan, Andrea Macanovic, Anna Peckham, Charlie Baranski, Cheyenne Wing, Kevin Sanders, Pranav Merchant.

Gutob data from this deposit was presented by Dr. Gregory Anderson and Dr. Bikram Jora at various international academic conferences between 2016 and 2018. Gutob research was included in presentations at the Symposium About Language and Society (SALSA), Documentary Linguistics: Asian Perspectives (DLAP-2), the 7th International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics (ICAAL 7), New Ways of Analyzing Variation Asia-Pacific (NWAV-AP5), the International workshop on typological profiles of language families of South Asia, the 1st International Conference of Munda Linguistics, the International Conference on Indian Languages in Contact Situations: Historical, Typological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives, as well as at other events.

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