Historically Significant Recordings Conserved and Digitalised

Adam Benkato, a Humbolt Fellow based in Berlin, has been in Leeds to work on a collection of old recordings on vinyl made by Professor Terrence Mitchell, former Head of the Department of Linguistics and Phonetics. The recordings were made in North Africa in the 1940s and include very rare and now-extinct dialects of Arabic and Berber, including Benghazi Jewish Arabic. Adam has started to clean the disks and digitise the recordings, which represent an extraordinary window into the linguistic history of North Africa. The conservation of these recordings comes in time for the 40^th anniversary of the merger of Linguistics and Phonetics into a single department at Leeds under Terrence Mitchell in 1977.