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WHEN HE WAS a Peace Corps worker in the remote backcountry of Liberia back in the 1970s, Tucker Childs felt like an outsider. "I drew a lot of attention," he says. "They had a saying there—'Eeeh, white men!'"

Then one day, Childs (pictured on the right) noticed a villager who reminded him vividly of Buddy Bertha, an old man Childs had known when he was growing up in the Midwest. "It was like an epiphany, only longer lasting," Childs explains "—a realization that, at the level of everyday interaction, just in being human, there are so many connections between us. And suddenly my sense of otherness was gone."

Nelson Mandela once said, "If you speak a language a man can understand, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart."

Over a career that spans three decades, Childs, a professor in PSU's Department of Applied Linguistics, has been speaking to the hearts of Africans. He has dedicated his career to a highly unusual specialty: documenting and preserving the disappearing tribal languages of West Africa, in nations like Guinea and Sierra Leone.

RIGHT NOW, Childs is working on his most ambitious project yet—the three-year Documenting Krim and Bom Project in Sierra Leone. Funded by grants from University of London's Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project and the National Science Foundation, Childs and students from the U.S., Europe, and Africa will track down and record the few remaining speakers of the Krim and Bom languages of West Africa.

Once common, Krim and Bom have been supplanted by the Mende language in Sierra Leone, one of the most widely spoken of the country's 20-plus languages and dialects. The reasons for their disappearance are complex, and include the changing political landscape of the country, the rise of militarism in this formerly peaceful part of the continent, and simple socioeconomics: to find work, people need to speak a common language.

"The tribes are still around, but they're adapting—assimilating," Childs says. "Many people there don't understand what we're doing. But the old people who speak Mani are so flattered. The last time I was there, we found two old ladies who had been refused permission to sing at a Susu festival. We interviewed them, and they were so grateful that we had given them a chance to speak."

Childs estimates that there are fewer than 40 fluent speakers of Krim left in Sierra Leone, and even fewer speakers of Bom, all scattered throughout the country's swampy coastal areas. "These people are really hard to find—they're all old, they don't speak it every day, it's a real challenge, but it's rewarding," he says.

Under Childs' direction, the members of the Documenting Krim and Bom Project team will search out those who speak the language, then document them via audiotape and videotape during Sierra Leone's dry season, from September through June. There will be two years of intensive fieldwork, followed by a year of writing up the results.

THE WORK IS GRINDING—and, at times, distressing. Childs, who speaks fluent Spanish and French, as well as Kisi, Swahili, Liberian English, and a smattering of many other African dialects, lost 40 pounds the last time he was in Africa. He's endured malaria and had guns pointed at him. The region's civil unrest has spawned horrific violence in recent decades.

"The physical context and grinding poverty are the two most salient features," he says. "The fact that the culture is so different is obviously another challenge. It's very hard work—you have to have a sense of yourself, but you also have to have the ability to subvert yourself and melt into the other culture."

Childs' situation is a little unusual because no one in Sierra Leone has asked him to come and document the country's disappearing languages, and he is pessimistic that they can be saved. But the project is part of Childs' efforts to bring healing to a region that has known inestimable sorrow and war since he first lived there as a Peace Corps volunteer.

"It's helping them to feel that their language and culture is legitimate," Childs says. Restoring the languages to viability, however, is another matter. "That's up to the people," Childs says.

WHAT WILL BE THE END RESULT of Childs' years of work? "The final product depends on what people want," he says. "We will definitely produce a dictionary and will also make available videos, recordings, pedagogical materials, whatever media they can use. Ultimately everything will be digitized and stored at the University of London and here. We've filled two 50-gig servers with what we already have."

So why is Childs willing to dedicate years of his professional life searching for disappearing languages in the backcountry of Africa? "I do it because it's something that would otherwise be lost," he says. "It's part of the world's cultural and linguistic heritage. If there are no other languages left to study, what are we going to do—study English all the time? Language is culture, and we are left poorer for the loss of a culture. I'm struck by the fact that the same places that are experiencing a loss of biodiversity are also experiencing a loss of linguistic diversity. The parallels are exact."

Jeff Kuechle, a Portland freelance writer, wrote the article "Generation Boomerang" in the fall 2007 Portland State Magazine.