Foreword

Pam Morris, an SIL linguist who began to assist the Bissa Barka community in 2013 in the development of their dialect, suggested that they hold a word collection workshop.

Pastor Bambara, the leader for the Bissa Barka translation project, spoke for the team in favor of holding a Rapid Word Collection workshop :
• encourage the Bissa Barka community to use and value their language
• enable the community to collect words that will soon be forgotten
• enable the community to re-discover nature, especially animal names
• enable the team to have enough words to do the translation
• help the church identify vocabulary to use in their services

The workshop was held March 4-27, 2015, and the results (totaling 14,354 words) constitute a significant part of the data for this dictionary.

It is evident by the efforts of the Bissa Barka themselves that they value their language and are promoting dictionary development.