UD_Ruuli-RDT is a Universal Dependencies (UD) treebank for the Ruruuli-Lunyala (Ruuli) language. The annotation was converted from interlinear glossed text and manually annotated for syntactic relations. The treebank includes texts from various sources: conversations, oral folktales, biographic monologue, movie subtitles, grammar examples, and factual prose. The treebank contains approximately 6,000 tokens.
The UD_Ruuli-RDT treebank consists of texts recorded in Ruuli or translated into it by native speakers, and subsequently glossed and annotated. The included texts are:
- spokenBio_Nakasongola1 (795 words): Biographic monologue on childhood years, schooling, work, and other life experiences
- spokenConv_Nakasongola1b (1223 words): Conversation between two speakers, a male and a female, about taking care of their elderly parents
- spokenConv_Nakasongola2 (1544 words): Conversation between two females about socio-economic issues
- spokenTale_Gweero (595 words): A traditional oral folktale about the cow who got in trouble with the lion and the hare who helped the cow
- spokenTale_Sokoso (373 words): A traditional oral folktale about a woman who mistreated her mother-in-law
- film_Inception (469 words): An excerpt from the translated subtitles for the film Inception (2010)
- grammar_Syntax (936 words): Language examples from A dictionary and grammatical sketch of Ruruuli-Lunyala (Namyalo et al. 2021)
- nonfiction_Aniinire (366 words): An excerpt from factual prose on the history and traditions of the language speakers
All sentences were converted from interlinear glossed text into CoNLL-U format using a custom conversion script. The syntactic relations were subsequently manually annotated following the UD framework.
Sentences from written texts and conversations were shuffled to anonymize the data.
- Spoken (incl. conversations, oral folktales, and biographic monologue): sentence IDs start with
spoken - Fiction movie subtitles: sentence IDs start with
film - Examples from the grammatical sketch: sentence IDs start with
grammar - Factual Prose: sentence IDs start with
nonfiction
-
This work was supported by the project "Event Packaging in Language" (University of Zurich Global Strategy and Partnerships Funding Scheme, 2023–2026).
-
Preparation of this dataset greatly benefited from the results of the project "A comprehensive bilingual talking Ruruuli/Lunyala-English dictionary" (funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, 2017–2020; PI Saudah Namyalo).
-
We acknowledge the contribution of Anatole Kiriggwajjo, Amos Atuhairwe, Zarina Molochieva, Ruth Gimbo Mukama, and Margaret Zellers.
-
Kira Tulchynska gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School MA Honors Program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
- Molochieva, Zarina, Saudah Namyalo & Alena Witzlack-Makarevich. 2021. Phasal Polarity in Ruuli (Bantu, JE.103). In The Expression of Phasal Polarity in African Languages. Raija Kramer (ed.). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 73–92. (doi.org/doi:10.1515/9783110646290-005)
- Namyalo, Saudah & Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena & Kiriggwajjo, Anatole & Atuhairwe, Amos & Molochieva, Zarina & Mukama, Ruth Gimbo & Zellers, Margaret. 2021. A dictionary and grammatical sketch of Ruruuli-Lunyala. Language Science Press. Language Science Press. (doi:10.5281/zenodo.5548947) (https://langsci-press.org/catalog/view/326/3386/2402-1) (Accessed December 12, 2024.)
- Ruppert, Eloisa & Namyalo, Saudah & Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena. Forthcoming. Negation in Ruuli (JE.103). In Miestamo, Ljuba, Matti Veselinova (ed.), Negation in the world’s languages I: Africa. Berlin: Language Science Press.
- Sørensen, Marie-Louise Lind & Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena. 2020. Clausal complementation in Ruuli (Bantu, JE103). Studies in African Linguistics 49(1). 85–110. (doi.org/10.32473/sal.v49i1.122264)
- 2026-05-15 v2.18
- Initial release in Universal Dependencies.
=== Machine-readable metadata (DO NOT REMOVE!) ================================ Data available since: UD v2.18 License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Includes text: yes Parallel: no Genre: fiction grammar-examples nonfiction spoken Lemmas: converted from manual UPOS: converted from manual XPOS: converted from manual Features: converted from manual Relations: manual native Contributors: Tulchynska, Kira; Veselovsky, Anna; Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena Contributing: here Contact: kira.tulchynska@mail.huji.ac.il ===============================================================================