III. DEVELOPING METHODOLOGIES AND PREDICTIVE MODELS FOR CONTACT-INDUCED CHANGE Journal of language contact – THEMA 3 (2010) www. jlc-journal.org Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:23:39PM via free access Journal of language contact – THEMA 3 (2010) www. jlc-journal.org Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:23:39PM via free access SOME METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS IN THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE CONTACT: THE CASE OF SENUFO AND MANDING (MALI) Klaudia Dombrowsky-Hahn University of Bayreuth 1. 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 1997) which are part of the Gur language family (Naden 1989; Roncador and Miehe 1998:190-191, see Fig. 1), in spite of the doubts some authors have in respect to this classification (Williamson and Blench 2000:25); the contact language Bambara is part of the Manding cluster, belonging to the Western Mande languages (Kastenholz 1996). 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. One of the objectives of this study was to demonstrate the validity of Thomason and Kaufman’s (1988) thesis, which suggested that the direction and the extent of borrowing depend on the social context of the groups of speakers in contact. 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 (1999) 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 (2010) www. jlc-journal.org Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:23:39PM via free access 110 Dombrowsky-Hahn sentences and the change of function of a marked genitive construction. In the present paper, the data concerning the last feature, i. e. the modification of a function of a native morpheme occurring in genitive constructions under the influence of the contact language, is compared with the results of a recent study of genitive constructions in a close relative of Minyanka, Supyire (Carlson 2006). 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: §2 contains information about the historical and sociolinguistic background of the region where Minyanka is spoken. In §3 I will mention the theoretical framework and the methodology applied in the former study; this section also summarises the linguistic features specific to Minyanka as it was supposed to be before the influence of Bambara and the borrowing of features from the contact language. §4 is an account of part of the data, the structural borrowing in the domain of genitive constructions in Minyanka, and of the advances in language description of its closest neighbour, Supyire. In §5 I conclude in discussing the consequences for the study of language contact. 2. Sociolinguistic background of the Minyanka-region and characterisation of the contact languages The settlement area of the Minyanka people, which is generally known as the ‘Minyankala’,1 is situated in Southern Mali. They are named by others Minyanka while they refer to themselves as BØam×alaa or Bamana. The Minyanka are said to number between 250,000 (Jonckers 1987:6) and 700,000 (Gordon 2005). Their neighbours in the north and west speak Bambara2, those in the south Dyula (Mande) and Supyire (Gur, Senufo), and those in the east Bobo (Mande, Soninke-Bobo) and Bomu (Central Gur) (see map 1). The region has been in contact with speakers of Manding languages3 for many centuries. The influence starts as early as during the empires of ancient Ghana and Mali and continues under the Ségou Kingdom (end of the 17th until beginning of the 18th century). 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. Later on, other circumstances had a special impact on the sociolinguistic situation of the region, such as the return of ancient slaves that the Ségou and Kénédougou empires had captured among the Minyanka, a reason why in some Minyanka varieties the Bambara language is called blo jomo ‘the slaves’ language’ (Jonckers 1987:5). Since Independence the spread of Bambara has been promoted by the educational system and the government. In the 1980s 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. The derivation morpheme -la meaning the ‘area inhabited by’ is suffixed to a name of a people or another noun designating a human being. 2 More precisely, the Bambara living in the west of the Minyanka region refer to themselves as Dyonka. They speak the Dyonka variety of Bambara. 3 I deliberately speak of Manding, as we do not know what the varieties spoken in the past were like. Journal of language contact – THEMA 3 (2010) www. jlc-journal.org Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:23:39PM via free access Some methodological problems in the study of language contact: Senufo – Manding 111 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. Map 1: Journal of language contact – THEMA 3 (2010) www. jlc-journal.org Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:23:39PM via free access 112 Dombrowsky-Hahn 3. Theoretical framework and methodology 3.1. The framework As a framework I have used Thomason and Kaufman’s (1988) theory of language contact in considering the Minyanka language. 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. Table 1: Scale of borrowing, following Thomason and Kaufman (1988:74-76) Degree Sociolinguistic situation Linguistic outcome 1 Casual contact Lexical borrowing only Lexicon: content words; non-basic vocabulary before basic vocabulary 2 Slightly more intense Slight structural borrowing contact Lexicon: function words (conjunctions, adverbial particles) Phonology: new phonemes introduced with loanwords Syntax: borrowed features restricted to new functions 3 More intense contact Slightly more structural borrowing Lexicon: function words (adpositions), derivational affixes abstracted from borrowed words and added to native vocabulary, personal and demonstrative pronouns, low numerals Phonology: phonemicisation of previously allophonic alternations, borrowing of prosodic and syllable structure features Syntax: a few aspects of a switch from SOV to SVO (e.