Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

LANGUAGE CONTACT: THE CASE OF MANDING AND JOLA-FOGNY

1999; Indiana University Press; Volume: 1; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/mnd.1999.a873307

2379-5506

Valentin Vydrin,

Historical Linguistics and Language Studies

LANGUAGE CONTACT: THE CASE OF MANDING AND JOLA-FOGNY* Valentin Vydrine IJola-FognythousandsbelongstotheofofJolaspeakersKajamutaylinguisticinisgroup,Basse-Casamancethelanguagewhichincludesof(Senegal)someoveratensdozenandof IJola-Fogny thousands of speakers in Basse-Casamance (Senegal) and belongs to the Jola linguistic group, which includes over a dozen different languages [Pozdniakov 1993: 20-21; Kennedy 1964]. In this region Mandinka serves as a lingua franca. This situation implies a massive infusion of Manding words into the vocabularies of the local languages. At the same time, Mandinka itself is developing in relative isolation fom the other languages of the Manding branch of the Mande family, such as Bamana and the Maninka of Guinea. The paucity of contacts with 'core Manding languages' has enabled the creation in Mandinka of a substratum derived from Fogny-Jola (and other local languages), which has further contributed to its separation from the other languages of the eastern Manding to such a point that mutual intelligibility has become difficult. 2.1. My analysis is based upon David Sapir's dictionary of Jola of Kajamutay [1989]. This 197-page manuscript dictionary includes some 4,000 entries, of which a great number are derived * A first version of this paper was presented in 1994 for Dmitry Olderogge's Readings. It has been translated from French by Stephen Belcher, to whom I express my thanks. Unfortunately, I have not been able to check David Sapir's Jola-French-English Dictionary for the English equivalents of the Jola words, so that the translations given in the present paper may differ from those of Sapir. Note: In the Arabic transcription, ç for ^ (for (emphatic s); T for i (emphatic t); x for cē, kh for The class of Jola nouns in indicated in parentheses. ABBREVIATIONS OF LANGUAGES Ar - Arabic Mnk - Maninka (especially Maninka Mori, Bnd - Bandi the dialect of Kankan in Upper Bmn - standard Bamana Guinea). Bdia - a local dialect of Bamana PMdn- Proto-Manding (Manding is a Ful - Pulaar/Fulfuldé branch within the Mande family Jol - Jola including Bamana, Maninka, Kpl - Kpelle Mandinka, Jula, Marka-Dafin, Ldm - Landuma Xasonka, etc.) Lmb - Limba PM - Proto-Mandé Lom - Looma SWM - Proto-language of the SouthMjk - Manjak West Mande branch Mdn - languages of the Manding group Wlf - Wolof Wsl -Wasulunka Mande Studies 1 (1999): 141-157 142 VYDRINE words. The author iden borrowings from Man many of the words w guages are not attest -saaf 'tax', kupa 'to keep an animal'. Sapir occasionally marks as Manding borrowings words which instead have been borrowed by Mandinka from Jola (e.g., Jol: -pasi > Mdk pàsii) 'to make a conventional gesture to someone, according to a code learned in initiation"), or from yet other languages, most often Wolof, which are foreign both to Jola and to Mandinka. 2.2. Examination of this corpus gave me 200 words shared by Kajamutay Jola with Manding languages. Of course it is quite possible that some of my connections will be wrong, and that I may have failed to identify some words of common origin; nevertheless, the figure of 200 words can serve us as a reference. 2.3. In theory, we can identify four paths to explain the appearance of words common to Jola and Mande languages: a. a loan Manding > Jola (including those cases where Manding serves as the intermediary between Jola and another language, most often Arabic); b. a loan Jola > Mandinka; c. an independent borrowing from a third language by Jola and Mandinka; d. a common origin (since Atlantic and Mande languages are related at the level of Proto-Niger-Congo). 2.4. Several criteria can be adduced to establish the origin of the word: a. if the word is attested in several Mande languages, including Mandinka, but absent from Atlantic languages other than Jola, then the lexeme is to be considered of Mande origin; b. if the word is not attested in Mande languages other than Mandinka, and if, moreover, it appears in several Atlantic languages, the origin can be attributed to Jola; c. words of Arabic origin pass most often into Jola from Mandinka, since this language is the local vehicle for Muslim faith and culture. The phonetic image of the word can also serve as an indicator, albeit a secondary one, of the direction...