Maasai Speech Samples

This is a collection of audio files from seven native speakers of Maasai, an Eastern Nilotic language spoken in southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania. These files are the raw data that were collected for analysis to write my dissertation, Vowel Harmony in Maasai (2013). The two fieldwork trips to Arusha, Tanzania were funded by a T. Anne Cleary International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the University of Iowa and by Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant BCS1149310 from the National Science Foundation. The majority of the data are inflected verbs produced in isolation. The intention with eliciting them was to compare ATR and non-ATR vowels under various conditions. It is hoped that these data could prove useful to linguists interested in Maasai or Eastern Nilotic languages. They could also be of interest to researchers of vowel harmony or tonal languages. Finally, some stories were also collected which could be of interest to a wider audience or to linguists wanting a more naturalistic speech sample.