The Casamance as an area of intense language contact: The case of Bainouk Gubaher (original) (raw)
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LANGUAGE IN CONTACT: THE CASE OF THE FULƁE DIALECT OF KEJOM (BABANKI
This paper describes the variety of Babanki (henceforth called Kejom) spoken by native Fulfulde speakers born and raised in Kejom communities. Kejom is a Center Ring Grassfi elds Bantu language spoken in two villages (Kejom Ketinguh and Kejom Keku) in northwestern Cameroon. This paper describes the practice in Kejom Ketinguh. The Fulɓe are Fulfulde speakers of Adamawa origin who migrated from northern Cameroon and settled in Kejom more than 50 years ago. Peaceful coexistence between the two groups has encouraged young Fulɓe to learn the Kejom language and to use it when interacting with Kejom people. Comparison of the speech of Fulɓe and native speakers of Kejom revealed that the Kejom spoken by the Fulɓe (the Fulɓe dialect) contains phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical deviations from the standard variety spoken by Kejom people. In addition to Fulfulde (the Fulɓe mother tongue), Cameroon Pidgin English (their second language) has also infl uenced the Fulɓe dialect of Kejom. We argue in this paper that the Fulɓe prefer to rely on Cameroon Pidgin English to fi ll most communication gaps with native Kejom speakers, because this widely used language is common to both communities.
Aikhenvald Language contact along the Sepik River
Abstract. The Sepik River Basin in New Guinea is a locus of substantial linguistic diversity, with several genetically related and unrelated languages in continuous contact.The inhabitants of the area divide into those who live on the Sepik River ('River dwellers') and those who live in the bush ('Jungle dwellers'). The two groups differ in their ways of subsistence, the knowledge of each other languages, and the impact of language contact. I then turn to Manambu, from the Ndu family, spoken by a war-like group of River dwellers, and the ways its grammar was influenced by the languages of the neighbouring Jungle dwellers, the Kwoma and the Yessan-Mayo. The lexical influence from the closely related Iatmul (also spoken by River dwellers) is restricted to a number of ritual genres (now obsolete). The patterns of interaction between Jungle dwellers and River dwellers, and the effects of language contact in the Middle Sepik are compared to the situation in the multilingual Vaupés area in Northwest Amazonia. In each case, the different means of subsistence, life-styles and interactions are responsible for different effects of contact-induced change.
Worlds apart: language survival and language use in two Middle Sepik communities
This contribution focuses on the language situation in two different communities of the Middle Sepik area, speaking closely related languages of the Ndu family – the Manambu and the Yalaku. The two groups maintain traditional features typical of 'river-dwellers' who live on the banks of the Sepir River (the Manambu) and those who live of the River, or 'jungle-dwellers' (the Yalaku), including subsistence and exchange patterns. Due to a history of interactions with the Kwoma-speaking people, the Yalaku language has incorporated numerous borrowings and grammatical calques from Kwoma (not genetically related to the Ndu family to which both Manambu and Yalaku belong). In contrast, there is hardly any Manambu-Kwoma multilingualism. A major difference between the two groups lies in the high number of loans from Tok Pisin in Manambu and the scarcity of them in Yalaku. The paper addresses the changes in the life styles of the two groups, contrasting their responses to social and cultural changes as reflected in linguistic change and in attitudes to language.
Siti/Kyitu; an endangered language of Côte d'Ivoire
Ghana Journal of Linguistics, 2013
Ce rapport présente le résumé du travail effectué, et de celui en cours, dans le cadre de la recherche linguistique mené en vue de décrire et de documenter la langue kyitu (ou siti). A l'origine intitulé «The Siti Pilot Project -Description and Documentation of an Endangered Language of Ivory Coast », ce projet financé par le Programme de Documentation des Langues en Danger (ELDP) a pour buts la prise de contact, le témoignage de la situation sociolinguistique, et le recueil de données sur cette langue parlée seulement à Vonkoro (Côte d'Ivoire), village situé près de la rive de la Volta Noire à la frontière du Ghana. Compte tenu du fait que le nombre des locuteurs kyitu était présumé faible et que la grande partie de l'information disponible sur cette langue était d'environ 90 ans, il nous a semblé nécessaire de découvrir son état actuel. Au début du projet, nous présumions qu'elle pouvait être déjà éteinte. Le rapport précise les différents aspects du projet : la rencontre d'information sur la nature et le but du projet aux Kyiras de Vonkoro, les recensements, la transcription et la prise des données, la compilation du lexique et du corpus, et l'impact du projet sur la communauté locale. En guise de conclusion, le rapport s'ouvre sur un sujet qui pose indubitablement problème ; notamment « dire que le kyitu est en voie de disparition serait difficile à justifier, mais dire que le kyitu n'est pas une langue qui risque de disparaître serait irresponsable ».
Moderna Språk
In this book, Asya Pereltsvaig, lecturer at Stanford University, sets out to give us an overview of the languages of the world and their structural diversity. Basing her description on concrete examples, she gives a typological view of the various language families, mostly, but not always, from a geographic starting point. The text is presented in a pedagogical and student oriented way that suggests great experience, both as a writer and a teacher. After an introduction where she discusses basic concepts like languages, dialects and accents, language families and language diversity the author starts off with a rather short chapter on the Indo-European languages, followed by eight chapters on the linguistic situation in different parts of the world, which give a very good overview of the present-day situation. At the end of each of these chapters she focuses on a specific linguistic question that is relevant to that particular group of languages or to the geo-cultural situation, e.g. 'Lesser known Indo-European Languages', 'Universals and parametric theory of the languages', 'Field linguistics' and 'Language contact'. This is a very good way of keeping the reader's interest. She also successfully avoids a tedious repetitive catalogue description of the geo-linguistic situation of the world by focusing on general typology and on a few representative or enigmatic cases. This way the book should capture the students' (i.e. readers') interest in continuing their reading, thus deepening their knowledge and motivation. The reader is provided with intriguing and motivating questions throughout the book, which show the author's deep knowledge and capacity to synthesize the complex matter into comprehensible résumés. The author has also included some small grey boxes where she discusses specific topics such as 'Knights, riders and false friends', 'Pioneers of the Pacific' and 'Language diversity and density'. The book ends with two chapters on 'macro families' (the idea of nostratic languages and similar "macroviews") and 'pidgins, creoles and other mixed languages'. The book is a truly exhaustive presentation of the languages of the world, focusing on the contemporary situation and the relationships between these languages, not only in terms of forming different "families" but also from a typological standpoint, which makes the reading more interesting and also offers a better scholarly perspective. This way the author is able to introduce the reader into such fields of vital linguistic interest as language contact, field linguistics, universals and the officiality of languages without a long repetitive presentation of all the world's languages but rather focusing on what is representative and characteristic, and this in itself makes the book more valuable as a textbook and as a stimulus. It is obvious that the value and utility of the book increases considerably because of this approach. There is no mistaking the fascination and interest on the part of the author in attempting to systematize and pedagogize such an enormous scholarly field as that
Grammatical Sketch and Short Vocabulary of the Ogiek Language of Mariashoni
2018
This work is a first, non exhaustive and tentative descriptive grammatical sketch of the dialect of the Ogiek language spoken commonly by the circa 15.000 people belonging to the 7 clans which compose the Morisionig family, and who live in the Eastern Escarpment of the Mau Forest having Mariashoni village as its focal point. The data have been gathered using the classical grammatical questionnaires contained in Bouquiaux-Thomas 1992 7 combined with the methodology suggested by the Dictionary Development program and toolkits proposed by SIL 8. The Fieldwork activities have been done during four months in January and February 2013 and 2014. Two were the main interlocutors: Catherine Salim and Victor Jeres. Both of them were young (among 20 and 25) and educated. Both had attended the college and could speak and understand English without too many troubles. Catherine lived in Mariashoni, while Victor came from a village called Njoro, located close to Elburgon, about 15 km far from Mariashoni. Between the Ogiek spoken by the two I could not identify any differences and both of them confirmed to me that they did not perceive any false notes in the other's way of speaking. All the sessions, which were held either in NECOFA's office in Mariashoni or in my house in Elburgon, far from disturbing noises, were recorded with a very simple Olympus DM550 digital voice-recorder. Besides, at least once a week, the team held also public sessions with the community elders living in different locations 9 of the area (Mariashoni, Ndoswa, Kiptunga, Kaprop, Molem, Njoro), in order to gather genuine pieces of oral history, tales, riddles, which were then transcribed, translated and finally used as a database for the linguistic analysis. Many of the examples reported in this work are taken directly form that data base of spontaneous speech 10. 7 9 questionnaires contained in Section 2 Linguistic Approach, Bouquiaux-Thomas 1992: 175-309. 8 https://www.sil.org/language-development 9 10 I thank here especially Emilie Chepkory Kirui and John Kipkoech Kemoi, who accompanied me, Catherine and Victor to visit the elders of the Mariashoni District. 2. Ogiek phonemes and phonology 11 2.1 CONSONANTS Analyzing the first 646 words collected, the phonetic repertoire of consonants in Ogiek (Table 1) resulted actually very similar to that of other Kalenjin languages, to which it is closely related, such as Nandi, as described by Creider & Tepsubei-Creider in 1989 12 , Kipsigis, Tugen and Pokot, as described by Kamuren in 2011 13 and Akie, as described by König et al. in 2015 14. 11 A first tentative discussion of the Ogiek phonetics and phonology has already been published by the author in Micheli, I. (2016) "We are indigenous and we want to be literate in our own language". The Ogiek of Mariashoni: a good example of how a literacy project with the best premises can be a failure" in AION 2016, vol 76, pp. 77-101. Brill and will thus not be reported here.