Bangime: Secret Language, Language Isolate, or Language Island? Abbie Hantgan, Johann-Mattis List To cite this version: Abbie Hantgan, Johann-Mattis List. Bangime: Secret Language, Language Isolate, or Language Island?. 2018. hal-01867003 HAL Id: hal-01867003 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01867003 Preprint submitted on 3 Sep 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Bangime: Secret Language, Language Isolate, or Language Island? Abbie Hantgan1* and Johann-Mattis List2 1 Dynamique du Langage, Lyon 2 Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena .* corresponding author:
[email protected] Draft, September 2018, to appear in Journal of Language Contact Abstract We report the results of a qualitative and quantitative lexical comparison between Bangime and neigh- boring languages. Our results indicate that the status of the language as an isolate remains viable, and that Bangime speakers have had different levels of language contact with other Malian populations at dif- ferent time periods. Bangime speakers, the Bangande, claim Dogon ancestry, and the language has both recent borrowings from neighboring Dogon varieties and more rooted vocabulary from Dogon languages spoken to the east from whence the Bangande claim to have come.