Abstract
Bangime is a language isolate, which has not been proven to be genealogically related to any other language family, spoken in Central-Eastern Mali. Its speakers, the Bangande, claim affiliation with the Dogon languages and speakers that surround them throughout a cliff range known as the Bandiagara Escarpment. However, recent genetic research has shown that the Bangande are genetically distant from the Dogon and other groups. Furthermore, the Bangande people represent a genetic isolate. Despite the geographic isolation of the Bangande people, evidence of language contact is apparent in the Bangime language. We find a plethora of shared vocabulary with neighboring Atlantic, Dogon, Mande, and Songhai language groups. To address the problem of when and whence this vocabulary emerged in the language, we use a computer-assisted, multidisciplinary approach to investigate layers of contact and inheritance in Bangime. We start from an automated comparison of lexical data from languages belonging to different language families in order to obtain a first account on potential borrowing candidates in our sample. In a second step, we use specific interfaces to refine and correct the computational findings. The revised sample is then investigated quantitatively and qualitatively by focusing on vocabularies shared exclusively between specific languages. We couch our results within archeological and historical research from Central-Eastern Mali more generally and propose a scenario in which the Bangande formed part of the expansive Mali Empire that encompassed most of West Africa from the 13th to the 16th centuries. We consider our methods to represent a novel approach to the investigation of a language and population isolate from multiple perspectives using innovative computer-assisted technologies.
Highlights
Bangime, a language isolate spoken in central-eastern Mali, represents an enigma, in terms of linguistics, and with regards to their past ethnographic affiliations and migration patterns
We know that the Bangande have had the opportunity to engage in contact with each of these populations, but because there are no written historical records of their past settlement and migration patterns, nor have there been any archeological investigations of the western portions of the Bandiagara Escarpment where the Bangande are found today, we must rely on data from the present to reconstruct a picture of the past
The results show that the populations of central-eastern Mali have strong affinities to West Africans, in particular, Niger-Congo speaking West Africans
Summary
A language isolate spoken in central-eastern Mali, represents an enigma, in terms of linguistics, and with regards to their past ethnographic affiliations and migration patterns. Today, [according to Glottolog] the Mande ethno-linguistic group consists of 75 languages and 172 dialects within the Niger-Congo phylum (Hammarström et al 2020) spoken by upwards of 30 to 40 million people (Vydrin 2009). The reason for this vast and far-reaching, yet recent, expansion lies in the people‘s presence within both the Mali The “cliffs Bozo” we sampled here are suspected to represent linguistically converted Bozo speakers, perhaps originally speakers of a Soninke-like language (Jeffrey Heath, unpublished study)
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