blind men and elephant fish : Recording ChiTonga

Another one of the research projects that we want to do in Malawi is to create a dictionary and grammar of the Chitonga language. As far as I can tell, this has never been done before. ChiTonga is spoken by the 200,000 or so Tonga people of Malawi. They are the dominate ethnic group where we will be living. Their language is distinct from that of the Tonga in Zambia and Zimbabwe. To help me with this we will be using a suite of lingustic software developed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics(SIL). These guys have been around for nearly 80 years and have worked in over 100 countries and with nearly 3000 languages. Right now I am trying to get my head around their ToolBox program.