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Langue de conversation courante dans tous les secteurs. Communiquer avec les autres. This includes convergence in the teaching of literacy. The Mauritian educational context is characterised by a situation where children are taught to read and write in two languages - French a second language and English a foreign language. Simultaneous biliteracy thus forms the backbone of the Mauritian education system. In this present system, two different approaches to teaching literacy are used for French and English.
In order to address these questions, I have divided this paper into six parts, in which I will 1 briefly describe the local context, 2 discuss the theoretical framework within which the research questions are addressed, 3 describe the methods used to collect data, 4 present the findings, 5 interpret the findings, and 6 make some recommendations.
Standard 1 to Standard 6. French colonisation and English colonisation It became independent in and a republic in While the French period saw the birth of a French-based Creole, the English period saw the influx of oriental languages through the indentured labourers who came to work on sugar plantations after the abolition of slavery. Mauritius is thus a linguistic melting pot, with multilingualism being part of everyday reality. However, unlike other African countries, the various languages have specific domains of use. Said in very simplistic terms 2 , the main languages used in the island are: It thus has the status of a foreign language; Mauritians, is also a language that is socially utilised.
However, in the Mauritian context, multilingualism does not necessarily mean multilingual literacies. It is true that censuses have their limitations, for instance, 1 census data are collected from the heads of families and what they say does not necessarily reflect the literacy practices of the rest of the family, and 2 census data are self-reports and their reliability is questionable. However, the above figures are revealing as to the general level of literacy, as well as the prevailing attitudes to literacy in the multilingual Mauritian context. We can thus argue, on the one hand, that these figures indicate that few Mauritians can read or can see themselves as being able to read in Creole, which is the language spoken by the majority.
On the other hand, the figures indicate that Mauritians have positive attitudes to literacy in the European languages. This can be explained partly by the sociolinguistic context, 2 Refer to Atchia-Emmerich for a recent analysis. Briefly, the present language-in-education policy, which is a remnant of our colonial past Carpooran, , involves the compulsory teaching and learning of literacy in two languages: Literacy in one oriental language is also available to parents who want their children to learn one of these languages.
However, while French is taught as a separate subject, English is taught as a subject as well as used as the only written medium of instruction as from the first year of primary education Standard 1. In the face of a number of definitions by various scholars, the report maintains that there is no one definition of literacy that is applicable and relevant across all contexts worldwide. A review of the theoretical literature suggests that there are two main approaches in the definition of literacy.
One of these approaches emphasises the various discrete skills that enhance literacy development Adams, Street uses the terms autonomous and ideological models to describe these two approaches, criticising the first approach for being too technical and for ignoring the contexts of literacy use. In this paper, I will argue that recognizing that there are multiple conceptualisations of literacy and multiple views of literacy helps in realising how complex literacy is, and hence how complex literacy instruction also is.
This definition includes the skills needed for reading development, while in no way ignoring the particularities of the context in which reading takes place and develops. Vocabulary Morpho-syntax World knowledge Pressley, Just as there are different conceptualisations of literacy, there are also different approaches to literacy instruction.
According to Gunning and Purcell-Gates , they are: In this approach, learning to read is seen as being similar to learning to speak, thus reading is taught holistically and naturally by immersing children in reading materials. Goodman suggests that readers use their background knowledge and the knowledge of the language to predict the content of the reading materials.
It seems that centre-countries, like America, have moved away from the whole language approach to the phonics approach National Reading Panel, There has also been a return to basal readers, which carefully take the reader through the various levels of reading difficulty Gunning, Such research is just only starting to look at the problematics of literacy development in multilingual postcolonial settings, which present very different contexts. The above discussion indicates that LEA makes a number of assumptions, such as the age of the learner adults and the level of oral and syntactic fluency high.
According to Wurr , LEA was used with some success in the mid s and s in L2 literacy courses with students of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The use of this approach in the context of Mali has not been without its critics. I would suggest that this approach also assumes, maybe wrongly for the case of Mali, that students are familiar with concepts of print: Once again, Maurer Indeed, research done in bilingual education systems in Canada has led people like Cummins and Roberts to argue that decoding skills appear to be transferable in languages that share the same writing systems.
Conversely, research recently carried out in Hong Kong, where children are made biliterate in languages that do not share the same writing system suggests that this transferability of skills is less automatic in these cases. Finally, the question of transferability of oral skills must be considered. Oral language proficiency is language specific. The above critical review of the literature on literacy and literacy instruction, more specifically the similar approach to teaching literacy in the L1 and the L2, brings us to consider Mauritius as a case study.
As mentioned above, Mauritius has its specificity: The research questions which will now be addressed are: The chosen teacher, who is in her late 50s, has been teaching for over 30 years. She has always taught in lower primary classes, because working with upper primary classes meant giving private tuition which she has always been unwilling to do.
This teacher consciously supplements the techniques of literacy instruction suggested in the textbooks with what she has learnt from her own personal experience. Data was gathered from the teacher using the semi-directed interview. Although such an individual interview technique has been criticised for it creates a situation where there are unequal power relations between the teacher and the researcher, the fact that the researcher has known the teacher for a long time diminishes this negative effect.
This research, in no way claims that the identified teacher subject is representative of Standard 1 teachers in Mauritius. The aim of each unit is to introduce the child to one particular sound. Some of the sounds to which children are introduced this first year at school are [i], [a], [m], [t]. Each unit contains two texts: I will focus on the first unit in this paper, as, in its structure and contents, it is representative of the other units in the textbook.
This text is characterised by: The aim of this poem and the series of activities following it is to teach the children the sound [i] and the letter i. The textbook can be divided into three sections: A limited number of words is introduced to the child; for instance, boy, girl, man, woman, bottle, bag, cat, ball, pencil. Similarly, a limited number of grammatical structures is introduced in the textbook: Unlike the French textbook, the English textbook does not present prose or poetry texts to the learner. Rather, it introduces learners to single words and then uses the scaffolding technique to introduce simple sentence structures in a very structured manner.
The case study reveals that although the teacher uses the student textbook to teach French literacy, she constantly supplements her teaching with the syllabic method. In the interview, she said that she has a photocopy of the book, which she uses to introduce her own grandchildren to reading in French. Unlike when she is teaching French, the teacher never breaks up words into syllables when teaching the children English. The reasons which the teacher gives for supplementing the teaching of French literacy with the more traditional syllabic literacy instruction method are that: Mauritius is thus a case of simultaneous biliteracy.
The English textbook does not borrow from the principles of the whole language approach, where learners are introduced to texts in English, nor does it draw on the Phonics approach, where learners are taught the grapheme-sound relationship. Word recognition is the main, albeit only, approach to literacy instruction.
These different approaches appear to be warranted by the fact that each language has a different domain of use in the local context. However, what appears highly problematic in the comparative analysis of the French and English textbooks is the assumptions that underlie the textbooks. In favouring the presentation of a long, complex text in French, the French textbook assumes that learners have fairly well developed decoding skills. Conversely, the English textbook assumes that learners have basic, if any, decoding skills at all. In teaching the letters of the alphabet to the learners in the first term of Standard 1, the English textbook assumes that Standard 1 learners do not recognise and cannot write individual letters then.
A comparative reading of the two textbooks thus indicates that the textbook writers do not necessarily agree on the decoding skills that the learners have when they start Standard 1. Furthermore, they do not acknowledge that decoding skills are transferable skills across languages that share similar writing systems. What also emerges as problematic in the comparative analysis of the textbooks is that they make different assumptions on the comprehension skills of the learners. While the French textbook assumes that the learners have certain comprehension skills in French, the English textbook assumes that the learner is not familiar with oral English.
Although the local sociolinguistic context does support this assumption, the problem seems to be that the French textbook assumes that learners can understand fairly complex French and that they are used to the poetic style of such texts. The extent to which the average Mauritian learner can understand a text of the complexity of the one in Unit 1 needs to be tested empirically. First of all, since there are different domains of use for English and French in Mauritius, it seems essential that the French and English textbooks be written 1 with the close collaboration between the English and French panels; 2 in close partnership with Standard 1 teachers; and 3 bearing the context in mind.
It seems to me that the research on the transferability of decoding skills can be used for the benefit of Mauritian teachers and learners. For instance, the relationship grapheme-phoneme for [m], [p], [t] are the same in English and French. Our analysis has indicated that Mauritius, with its specificities, does not favour convergence of approaches in literacy instruction, and that this lack of convergence is warranted by the distinctiveness of the sociolinguistic context. Thirdly, it is recommended that research be carried out on the oral proficiency that children have as they start primary school.
Census data indicate that English is hardly used as a home language. The local context shows that English is hardly a social language and that Mauritian children are very little exposed to oral English in their everyday lives. It thus appears warranted to teach English oracy and literacy simultaneously as is being done in the Standard 1 English textbook. Conversely, Mauritian children are exposed to French in the local environment, but there is no research as to the level of oral proficiency or the nature of that proficiency for the average Mauritian Standard 1 learner.
It is thus hard to assess the extent to which the learners are comfortable with the level of difficulty of the texts which are in the French textbook. Although it appears that some of the principles of the whole language approach can be used in the Mauritian context, an understanding of the oral French language proficiency of learners can illuminate textbook writers on the choice of the texts to be included in the future Standard 1 French textbooks.
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Profil sociolinguistique de Pierre B. Langues que lui parlent: Au village, on ne parle pas mandinka. Quels en sont les raisons et les facteurs? Voici un dialogue entre un vendeur d'oranges mandinka et sa cliente joola qui, semble-t-il, ne se connaissent pas ; le vendeur commence par les salutations rituelles dans sa propre langue: Ma soeur es-tu en paix? C'est pourquoi, le wolof est la langue qu'il parle le plus. Dans la maison, les petits enfants, de trois ans, quatre ans, ne parlent que le wolof.
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Social motivations for code-switching. Histoire de la Casamance. A grammar of Diola-Fogny. International Journal of Sociology of Language Webb, Vic et Kembo-Sure. An introduction to the languages and linguistics of Africa. Introduction The aim of this contribution is to examine the strategies used to integrate loanwords into the morphological structure of Fula.
Languages use different strategies to integrate borrowings into their phonological or morphological system. Out of the three well-known strategies of integration of borrowed nouns into a noun class system Heine They are automatic and phonological allocation. However, traces of semantic allocation are visible even in automatic allocation in the assignment of borrowed nouns to plural classes.
Such a two-staged class assignment has been proposed for Bantu languages but see Pasch and Strauch Nevertheless, on morphological grounds, different stages of integration can be distinguished. On the basis of data from the Fuuta Jaloo, consisting mainly of Mande loanwords, three stages of integration of loanwords into the noun class system can be identified: In other varieties of Fula roughly similar integration strategies have been suggested see Labatut Another aspect of the analysis concerns the distribution of loanwords across noun classes.
The challenge is to establish the degree to which noun classes are being lost, and to assess their productivity in the borrowed words, in comparison with their use with native Pular words. I will first present the morphological structure of Fula and Mande languages in section 1. Then I will examine the mechanisms of integration in section 2, and finally the structure of the integrated loanwords will be studied and compared with those of the original Pular word in section 3.
Data from the Bambara language were given to me by Raimund Kastenholz. Secondary data for the other languages, were taken from the following sources: Morphological structure of Pular words The canonical structure of Pular nouns is bimorphemic, as is generally the case in all varieties of Fula. This is shown in 1. A noun is composed of a stem plus a nominal class- marking suffix. Most class suffixes are organized into singular-plural pairings, as exemplified in 2: The mappings between singular and plural suffixes are shown in Table 1.
Overview of Fula Pular? Allomorphs of Pular noun classes and their semantics3 Noun class Numb Semantic category Suffix grades er 1 2 3 4 -m ba sg. For example, a class suffix like -mba can have different forms or grades: The grade which can be selected is lexically 3 Languages of the Atlantic group, unlike those of the Bantu family, have no unified standard class suffix numbers. More examples and further information are found in Wilson among others.
Mechanisms of integration of Mande loanwords The number of Mande languages with which Pular is or was in contact is enormous. My data stem from many of these languages which are spoken in Guinea or on its immediate borders. Because of the diversity of sources and the existence of cognates in many of the donor languages, I could not find a reliable criterion for discerning the exact source language. In 5 , some words from Mande languages which are borrowed into Pular are given with a Mande language in which they are attested, without claiming that this is the actual donor language.
This convention is followed throughout the paper. Mande languages are not noun class languages as Atlantic languages are. This feature is one of the salient differences between the two language families. The main question is then what internal word structure is attributed to Mande nouns to make them fit into the bimorphemic Pular word structure. The first option is to integrate these nouns into one of the Pular noun classes, as evident through the appearance of agreement markers, but without the suffixation of a class marker to the noun itself. In this case, the borrowed word retains the monomorphemic structure of the source language.
The class suffix appears in concordance and in the plural. Examples are given below in 6 with kofon sg. Most of these nouns are also integrated into Pular without any morphological change, the only exception being tones, which are not attested in Fula. Here are some examples with the definite article on and some of its allomorphs in the concordance: Some languages, such as Maninka, Soso, Jaxanka etc. Also most of the existing sources on these languages do not mark tones; for instance, Bazin , Camara , Bathily and Meillassoux etc. In the presentation of examples, tones are marked as they appear in the source mainly from my own data collection.
However, the agreement marker is based on the phonetic similarity between their final syllable and existing Pular noun class suffixes the main forms of the agreement markers, which become nasalised as definite articles, are given in parentheses. Apart from the fact that they occur mainly in the Fuuta Jaloo variety of Fula see Zoubko , there are strong arguments for considering them as loanwords. Furthermore, no other related derivations or common paradigms of word formation in Pular, for example for categories like diminutive and augmentative, are attested for taande, although they exist for tannde.
Paradigm of taande-like words in Pular Singular Plural dim. The apparent suffix does not alternate with the corresponding plural suffix in the same paradigmatic position, but the plural is rather formed by the suffixation of the plural suffix -ji to the stem ending in -nde. In conclusion, the apparent binary morphological structure of loanwords like taande and tannde in the singular, with a noun class-like ending, is misleading. The loanwords adopting this integration strategy retain a simplex structure. This is why the attempt to proceed to a paradigmatic substitution of the apparent singular noun class suffix -nde with free noun class suffixes of Pular diminutive, augmentative etc.
Furthermore, the cultural mostly religious and historical aspects of the Fula dominance over the Mande are recent. Before the installation of an Islamic state in this area around , which gave power to the Fula, those first nomadic Fula, named Pulli, had been dominated by the then powerful Soso group in the Fuuta Jaloo for nearly five centuries— since the middle of the 13th century. Vydrine this volume proposes an alternative perspective of the directionality of borrowing for taande and tannde.
He considers that these words and also punne among others are actually borrowed from Pular into the diverse Mande languages, where they lost their noun class suffixes and were reanalyzed as monomorphemic nouns, just retaining some phonological similarity. I would like to argue that at least taande and tannde are more plausibly loanwords originating in a Mande language, as the morphological evidence suggests. A glance at the left column of 9 shows that the final sounds a single phoneme or sound sequences of the Mande words are identical with the noun class suffixes of the right column.
This similarity leads speakers to reanalyse those final sounds a vowel or an entire syllable as the noun class markers which resemble them phonologically in Pular. They will appear in the concordance system of that loanword. This process will be termed here a morphological reanalysis. This phenomenon can only be achieved if the semantics of the noun class is compatible with that of the stem of the loanword. There are, however, no morphological or phonological constraints which forbid such a reanalysis, either in the syllable shape or at the phonotactic level for the primacy of such formal constraints in the integration of loanwords into Bantu noun class systems see Demuth In the following table it is shown how morphological reinterpretation is hindered by the semantic features of potential noun classes, which otherwise would phonologically match the loanwords.
There is a large range of loanwords which integrate in the same way. Such words bear no suffixes in the generic singular form. There are also a few indigenous Pular words mainly of closed word classes which behave in the same way. If 12 This word stems from Portuguese chave and presumably came through Mande languages into Fula. Most of the other Fula varieties do not have this word. Their speakers use the word sottirgal. Examples of the last category of integration as well as of generic use can be seen below 12 and The noun bete is used in a generic sense; it does not refer to a specific person.
Accordingly, in the singular form, there are three categories of integration strategy available: The majority of loanwords are integrated into Pular according to 14i or 14iii. There is a series of words belonging to 14i which do not refer to human beings, but which are morphologically integrated in the singular form into the class of human beings.
The second category of integration 14ii , where phonologically and semantically compatible loanword endings are reanalysed as agreement markers, is exemplified in 6. The third category of integration includes words which may or may not bear a noun class suffix in the singular. The selection of a class in this category of nouns also undergoes semantic criteria of compatibility. These different integration options and the corresponding linguistic parameters are summed up in the following table: The class suffix does not occur in the singular. Such a structure seldom exists in Pular nominals; it is attested only in functional categories such as conjunctions, prepositions, etc.
The new structure is: This is an important question, given that this language undergoes a very high degree of borrowing both from the surrounding Mande languages and from French. Pular, and then to see how they are affected by the increasing amount of borrowed lexemes. Proportion of noun classes in Pular and in the loanwords Which classes are more frequent in Pular and which ones change through borrowing?
To answer the first question I used indigenous Pular nouns from a item wordlist. The distribution of classes is shown in the following chart 1. Two noun class suffixes are dominant in this chart: However, they are inflectional categories, whose primary function is plural building and not singular marking. Distribution of noun classes in Pular In chart 2 I show the proportions to which the various noun class suffixes are assigned to foreign nouns: The analysis shows that more than two third of loanwords are integrated into the class for humans.
The following conclusions can be drawn from the two charts above: The following comparative chart combines these statistics and shows this symmetry: Noun classes in Pular vs. This is in correlation with the role of this class as the default noun class for non-classifiable nouns, i.
They belong to two different categories: These are very restrictively used, e. Conclusions In conclusion to this study we come to the following findings: The Nominal and Verbal Systems of Fula. Bathily, Abdoulaye et Claude Meillassoux. Paris - New Jersey: Bantu noun class systems: Loan word and acquisition evidence of semantic productivity. Loanwords and Swahili nominal inflection. Essays in honour of Marcel van Spaandonck.
ART bring 1SG elder. As mentioned above, the cultural pressure by Manding speakers was not evenly spread through the entire Minyanka region, the northern part having undergone a longer and more intense contact with Bambara than the rest of the region. This combination of factors prevented the Mandekan warriors from having as great an effect in the north as they did in the south. Atlantic and Mande introduced Section 2. A grammar of Diola-Fogny. The same is true for nouns denoting paired body parts — they can be used with or without the plural marker: During that trip, we also visited the Kuru-Maninka area, which made it possible to clarify the linguistic status of that variety.
Allocation of loanwords in the nominal class systems of some Togo remnant languages. Journal of African Languages Langue arabe et langues africaines. Nordic Journal of African Studies 9- 3: Lexical phonology and morphology: The nominal classes in Fula. New York - London: Pasch, Helma and Christiane Strauch. Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere AAP Grammaire moderne du Pular. Tadmor, Uri and Martin Haspelmath. Measuring the borrowability of word meanings from a comparative perspective: Results from a loanword typology study. Traces of nominal classification in the Mande languages: Petersburg Journal of African Studies 3: Guinea languages of the Atlantic group.
Description and internal classification. Senri Ethnological Report 4. National Museum of Ethnology. Petersburg State University 1. It is spoken by a dispersed ethnic group in the central part of Futa Jallon Guinea. So Kakabe speakers have no direct contacts with the speakers of closely related languages. Instead, they live in daily contact with the politically and socially dominant Pular language; the influence of the second largest language of Guinea, Maninka, is also very visible. They have no other name for themselves or for their language. We are thankful to Antonina Koval for her numerous comments and corrections concerning presentation of Pular forms, their origin, and many others.
Those who refused to become subjugated to the Fulbe migrated to the West; Mogofin are their descendants. Until very recently, Mokole languages, and especially Kakabe, were profoundly neglected by linguists. Only Koranko has a grammar and a dictionary Kastenholz a, b. There is a M. The very existence of Kakabe had passed practically unnoticed, seemingly because it was usually taken for Maninka.
Of late, the Kakabe language has attracted some interest from specialists. A couple of years ago, Kakabe language data were collected but have not yet been published by Abdourahmane Diallo; his observations concerning Mande influence on Pular were published in Diallo These data were analyzed by Alexandra Vydrina in , and in January-February she made her first field trip to Guinea. As a result, further data for the Sokotoro dialect of Kakabe were collected and analyzed.
During that trip, we also visited the Kuru-Maninka area, which made it possible to clarify the linguistic status of that variety. Current situation of the Kakabe language The number of Kakabe speakers is unknown: According to our field data, Kakabe villages form two relatively compact areas: In the same publication, about Mogofin p. There are also several villages further to the East, on the left bank of the Donbele river, which are considered as populated by ethnic Kakabe who have lost their language and speak only Pular: Although bilingualism in Pular is omnipresent among the Kakabe, its impact seems to be uneven.
Pular is considered a more prestigious language here, and many ethnic Kakabe especially young people speak Pular better than their own language. In this case, a language shift is under way. Consequently, the amount of borrowing from Pular is greater in the dialect of Sokotoro than in the dialect of Saajoya. Another factor that should be taken into consideration is a wide distribution of Kakabe- Maninka bilingualism.
Let us try to single out the features of the Kakabe language which may have resulted from Pular influence. There are consonants and types of combinations of consonants that have established in the system or have consolidated their phonological status as a result of lexical borrowings from Pular. Among these are implosives, geminates and the affricate c. This might be due to the fact that, as has already been mentioned, the influence of Pular is stronger in Sokotoro than in Saajoya. Here are these words: Otherwise, c appears as a free variant of k before front vowels, for example: It should be mentioned that in some other words, k- undergoes no variation in the same phonetic context: However, in Bettison we find a form with a non-implosive, and this word is absent from [Zoubko ].
Where no dialect is indicated, the form is present in both dialects. In Pular forms, noun class prefixes are separated by dashes. In the meantime, they are extremely frequent in Pular as well as in many other Atlantic languages. In Kakabe, the overwhelming majority of lexemes with geminated consonants come from Pular. Here is an exhaustive list of them for both the Sokotoro and Saajoya dialects: We find in Bamana the following forms: In fact, it may be: This root is well attested in other Mande languages as well: There are several French loans with geminated consonants whose form indicates Pular as a mediator: The word paccala, as far as we can judge, is not attested in other Mande languages.
It is not yet clear whether the gemination of inner consonants should be reconstructed for the Proto-Western Mande at least as a marginal feature or whether its presence in Soninke, Xasonka and some Mandinka dialects is an areal phenomenon. Apart from lexical gemination, considered above, Kakabe also has a morphophonemic gemination which is a regular and productive phenomenon: Without going into further details concerning this phenomenon which has its particularities in each of the two Kakabe dialects under consideration , we shall simply mention that it testifies to the fact that gemination is well integrated into the phonological system of Kakabe, which can be considered as a contact-induced change.
Syllabic structure Typical syllabic structure in Mokole languages is CV or CVN -N being a nasal sonorant which is realized as a nasalization of the preceding vowel before a pause or as a sonorant homorganic with the subsequent consonant. In Kakabe, closed syllables in non-final position in the word are not rare, but practically all are borrowed from Pular: In both cases, the problem of geminated consonants was skipped. Vocabulary There are semantic groups where the number of borrowings from Pular into Kakabe is especially significant.
Let us consider them, one by one. Kinship terms Unfortunately, we have no data concerning the frequency or rarity of mixed marriages between Kakabe and Fulbe, but the large amount of borrowed kinship terms testifies to the presence of this phenomenon: The overwhelming majority of plant and animal names in Kakabe come from Pular. It is very interesting that, according to Antonina Koval personal communication , a great majority of the Pular forms serving as sources for the Kakabe loans are borrowed into Pular from other languages, most probably from Mande.
The root is well attested in different branches of the Mande family: It may be reconstructed for Proto-Mande as a word for a biting insect. However, taking into account the fact that pineapple was introduced to Africa by Europeans who brought it from South America , its direction of borrowing among African languages is difficult to establish.
Verbs Borrowing of verbs is an indication of the intensity of language contact. In Kakabe, the number of loans in this group of words is impressive: Various semantic groups of nouns21 This list shows that no sphere of life remained untouched by the Kakabe-Pular language contact: When Mande languages are mentioned as the source, it may mean either that the word was borrowed first to Pular, then from Pular to Kakabe; or that it may be an original Mande word. However, against the Mande origin of this word in Pular testifies the fact that it is well-attested in different Pular-Fulfulde dialects.
In their own language, western dialects in Senegal and Guinea are referred to as Pulaar and Pular respectively, while central and eastern dialects are named Fulfulde. Passive marker The dialect of Saajoya is remarkable for the fact that it has a special marker for passive voice, which is rather exceptional in the entire Mande language family. The passive suffix -ma is attached to the verb after tense and aspect markers and after the participle markers, if they are present in the verb form: This suffix is not attested in the dialect of Sokotoro village, where the passive meaning is expressed by affixless forms, as elsewhere in Mande: It is highly probable that the emergence of the passive suffix in the Saajoya dialect can be explained through Pular influence.
However, further on, this author writes: As for the Maninka, Soso and Jalunka speakers who live within the Fuuta Jaloo, that is, in the areas where Pular is spoken by the entire population, they do not use such constructions [i. The reason for this is that the people of Mande origin who live there have a very good command of Pular, and the majority of Mande speakers are even more competent in Pular than in their own ethnic language Diallo Repetitive action marker Both Sokotoro and Saajoya dialects of Kakabe have a repetitive verbal prefix ta- expressing a repetition of the situation denoted by the verb: In some languages among them, Maninka and Bamana the preverbs have advanced along the line of morphologization to the degree where they can be considered as true prefixes.
In Maninka, the most common prefixes are: The Kakabe situation is very similar to that of Maninka: It is difficult to say whether the emergence of the repetitive meaning of ta- in Kakabe should be attributed to Pular influence or not, but it does not seem improbable. Plural In Mande languages, plural is expressed, as a rule, by a suffix or a clitic added to the noun or to the final word of a noun phrase. In reality, number does not represent here a true grammatical category the singular and plural forms represent a privative opposition, rather than equipollent , for which reason the use of the plural marker is not obligatory and, generally speaking, less common, in comparison with the languages where it is incorporated into a morphological paradigm.
In the majority of Mande languages, the plural marker is usually not added to the names of paired body parts; it is also absent with nouns modified by a numeral. In Kakabe, plural marking is used more profusely than in Manding languages.
See, for example, the usage of the plural marker with a mass noun: Sometimes the plural markers can be added to both the noun and the numeral, although such cases are rare: However, the plural marker is not obligatory in a nominal group with a numeral, and the noun can be used without it, for example: The same is true for nouns denoting paired body parts — they can be used with or without the plural marker: In Pular, number is expressed within the grammatical classificatory category of the noun class, therefore its expression is obligatory.
Nouns of plural noun classes are necessarily used with numerals: There are good reasons to assume that the increased frequency of the plural marker in Kakabe may be due to Kakabe-Pular bilingualism. Pronouns The pronominal systems of Sajoya and Sokotoro differ in some details, but both of them have inclusive and exclusive 1pl. As we can see, in both dialects the inclusive form stems from combination of 1pl. However, it is absent in other Mokole languages, and in the Manding group it is also very marginal: In Kakabe, the inclusive pronoun can be used in any context, and not only in the imperative or optative: In Pular, exclusive men and inclusive en 1pl.
The transparent etymology of the inclusive pronoun in Kakabe provides strong evidence in favor of its innovative character in this language. It is highly probable that Pular influence could be at least one of the factors which has contributed to the establishment of this opposition in Kakabe. Another very interesting Kakabe phenomenon which seems to have no analogy in the Mande26 family is the use of the 2pl. Here too, both 2pl. It is only logical to consider this use as one more instance of Pular influence upon Kakabe. We have no information concerning relativization patterns in Lele and Mogofin.
In Koranko, both abovementioned strategies are possible; the relative clause may also be embedded into the main clause, but only when the head noun appears in the function of subject Kastenholz In Kakabe, all three strategies are common. ART bring 1SG elder. Contrary to the Koranko, in Kakabe the head noun may occur in any noun phrase position in the main clause, not only that of subject.
When the relative clause refers to an indirect object, it may result in an immediate sequence of two postpositions one belonging to the main clause, and the other to the relative clause , which would be absolutely ungrammatical in Manding languages: Strategies 2 and 3 seem to be significantly more popular in Kakabe than strategy 1. It is probable that the frequent use of the embedded relative clause strategy strategy 3 , the closest among the three to the Pular type although not identical with it is due to Pular influence. Conclusion It is only natural that in the situation of a total Kakabe-Pular bilingualism, with Pular as the politically and culturally dominant language, the impact of the latter on the Kakabe language can be felt at all levels of the language.
In reality, Mande-Pular contact-induced changes on Futa-Jallon is a bilateral process. As shown by Diallo , in the Dabola area eastern Futa-Jallon , Pular spoken by bilinguals is characterized by numerous structural changes apart from the countless lexical borrowings: Language contact between Mande and Atlantic in Guinea. Petersburg Russia , September , Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Grammaire fondamentale du bambara. Basics of African linguistics. Aspect Press, Russkie slovari, p. IV Conference of young scholars in typology and grammar.
Petersburg, November , Vowel length in the Kakabe language. Vydrine, Valentin, Bergman, T. Location and genetic classification. Introduction The study of language contact in hitherto undescribed or scarcely described languages poses special methodological problems. This is the case for many of the Atlantic and Gur languages that are in contact with Mande languages. In regions where the Mande languages Bambara, Dyula or Malinke have gained a certain prestige, it is not only the local vernacular Atlantic or Gur language under study that manifests contact-induced change, but also other related languages, which are needed as a point of comparison.
Thus, in several cases it is difficult to determine the exact function of a morpheme or a construction and to decide whether or not a certain phenomenon is due to the influence of the contact language. In this paper I shall report on a study of language contact in Southern Mali carried out in the context of a graduate program at the University of Bayreuth. The languages in contact studied here belong to two different branches of the Niger-Congo phylum, Gur and Mande. The vernacular language Minyanka alternate names: Mamara, Mianka belongs to the Senufo languages Northwestern group, cf.
Carlson which are part of the Gur language family Naden ; Roncador and Miehe Bambara is the most important language in Mali in terms of both native speakers and as a lingua franca, and in the Southern part of the country it is undeniably the most widespread lingua franca.
Senufo languages have been in contact with Manding for several centuries. However, the intensity of the contact situation has changed considerably since the colonial period, as the Manding is gaining more and more ground in different domains. To this end, two Minyanka varieties supposed to have experienced slightly different contact situations were compared. Other Minyanka varieties and related Senufo languages served to reconstruct the pre-contact Minyanka structures.
In Dombrowsky-Hahn it has been shown that language contact with Bambara and other Manding varieties has motivated the reordering of the Minyanka phoneme system, the occurrence of new genders in the noun class system, the borrowing of structures in complex Journal of language contact — THEMA 3 www. In the present paper, the data concerning the last feature, i.
Supyire is another Northwest Senufo language which is, like Minyanka, also in contact with Manding languages, especially with Bambara.
The comparison of the two studies will be used to demonstrate the problems occurring in the study of contact-induced change in underdescribed Minyanka or only recently described Supyire languages. My aim is to show that the study of languages in a multilingual setting necessitates continuous thorough and ongoing language description combined with procedures usually applied in sociolinguistics. The paper is structured as follows: The Minyanka are said to number between , Jonckers The region has been in contact with speakers of Manding languages3 for many centuries.
In the 18th century Dyula trading bases were installed along the trading routes coming from Kong—these correspond approximately to the present-day central north-south routes. Since Independence the spread of Bambara has been promoted by the educational system and the government. In the s the Malian government introduced Bambara as the teaching language in the first years of primary school and in adult literacy courses in the Minyanka region. Civil servants working in the region come from all over the country and Bambara is, much more than the official language French, the language of wider communication in the villages.
To sum up, the Bambara language of the politically and socio-economically powerful Manding speakers has been spoken among the Minyanka for a long time, however we can assume that it is only since the colonial period and Independence that it has gained more ground. In addition, there is variation in the extent of Bambara cultural pressure in the northern 1 This term is a Bambara construction used in Bambara and, by some speakers, in French.
They speak the Dyonka variety of Bambara. Senufo — Manding Minyankala compared with the rest of the area. The Northern sub-region had received the greatest number of ancient slaves—that is, bilingual speakers—after the end of the empires. Additionally the adjacence of this area to the area inhabited by Bambara speakers, and a greater openness towards strangers, have favoured the use of Bambara in this sub-region.
Theoretical framework and methodology 3. According to the authors, contact-induced language change is determined by a given sociolinguistic situation and not by linguistic constraints. The sociolinguistic context decides the direction and the extent of borrowing. Thomason and Kaufman argue that, in cases of intensive contact between speakers of different languages, it is the language of the group that has more socioeconomic or political power that becomes the source of borrowing.
The more intense a contact is, the more opportunity there is for bilingualism to develop and consequently the more borrowing takes place. Greater intensity here means a longer time span of contact, a greater number of speakers of the dominant language, more significant socioeconomic or political pressure, or more intimate contact between speakers. Thomason and Kaufman establish a scale where the borrowing of specific linguistic features is assigned to particular contact situations.
It is roughly summarised below. Scale of borrowing, following Thomason and Kaufman The method Thomason Senufo — Manding identified; 3 shared structural features have to be identified; 4 it has to be shown that the relevant features did not exist before the receiving language came into contact with the source language; 5 it has to be proven that the proposed interference features were present in the source language before it came into contact with the receiving language Thomason Since no earlier stages of the Minyanka language are documented, the study of contact- induced changes had to resort to the examination of languages or varieties closely related to the receiving language.
As mentioned above, the cultural pressure by Manding speakers was not evenly spread through the entire Minyanka region, the northern part having undergone a longer and more intense contact with Bambara than the rest of the region. In order to test the hypothesis that the linguistic outcome of the contact situation would differ in the two sub-regions, locations in the eastern and northern parts of Minyankala have been chosen. Yorosso and Karagouroula are two villages situated in the eastern part of the Minyanka region.
While many villagers know some Bambara, only younger speakers are proficient in it. As a single variety is spoken in both villages I refer to the Minyanka of Yorosso when presenting data from either of them, Yorosso or Karagouroula. Numerous people from different parts of Mali have settled in this part of the Minyankala, which has experienced longer and more intense contact with Bambara speakers. I assumed that structures found in Yorosso would correspond more than those found in Mpessoba to original Senufo structures.
If the relevant features cannot be supposed to have been present in a pre-contact Minyanka variety, and if they resemble Mande structures, they are assumed to be borrowed. The application of this method is problematic for two reasons: