Abstract
Northern Toussian is a language spoken in southwest Burkina Faso. Like many of the ethnicities in the region, members of the musical caste, the griots, have developed a musical surrogate language which is played on the balafon. This article is a preliminary documentation of the Northern Toussian balafon surrogate language, describing its cultural usage, analyzing how the tones of the spoken language are encoded in the surrogate language and comparing the Northern Toussian surrogate language with the neighboring Sambla surrogate language. It was found that the Northern Toussian surrogate language encodes significantly more post-lexical features of the spoken language than the Sambla surrogate language, such as downdrift.
Highlights
Musical surrogate languages are encodings of speech using musical instruments
Like the Northern Toussian surrogate language, syllables with level tones are encoded by single strikes and contours as well as codas are encoded by flams; Seenku extends the use of flams to long vowels, and sesquisyllabic words are encoded in the same way as onset consonant clusters in Northern Toussian
This paper has described the musical culture of the Toussian and demonstrated how the surrogate language functions at a basic level, showing that lexical tone is the primary feature represented by the balafon
Summary
Northern Toussian is a language spoken in southwest Burkina Faso. Like many of the ethnicities in the region, members of the musical caste, the griots, have developed a musical surrogate language which is played on the balafon. This article is a preliminary documentation of the Northern Toussian balafon surrogate language, describing its cultural usage, analyzing how the tones of the spoken language are encoded in the surrogate language and comparing the Northern Toussian surrogate language with the neighboring Sambla surrogate language. It was found that the Northern Toussian surrogate language encodes significantly more post-lexical features of the spoken language than the Sambla surrogate language, such as downdrift. Specialty section: This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Communication.
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