Input limitations in a diffuse linguistic setting: Observations from a West African contact zone

Abstract

The sociolinguistic background of multilingual rural societies in West Africa and the prevailing conditions of language transmission are quite different from those found in most immigrant situations in the Global North. In the case focused upon here, the target language itself is under constant pressure from other, more dominant contact languages, and the usual repertoire of a fully competent speaker already involves a larger number of language sources and internal variations. This article explores the verbal behaviour of three speakers of the endangered language Pana (Gur/Niger-Congo; Mali/Burkina Faso) who experienced varying degrees of interrupted language transmission in earlier life times. They were all brought up in situations where only one of the parents spoke Pana as a first language and where it was not part of their general linguistic environment. The speakers find themselves now in a setting where local people prefer Pana and consider it the most appropriate code for village dwellers in community-internal communication. Accordingly, the speakers under scrutiny struggle with the communicative obligations and try to cope with their usually fully competent conversation partners’ expectations. The presented analysis of discourse data shows the manifold and complex linguistic and social implications of such a situation. It will be argued that it is correspondingly difficult to disentangle general language contact phenomena from variation introduced through incomplete second-language acquisition. Furthermore, the data strongly suggests that the background of a diffuse linguistic system and a relatively unfocused society entails a greater liberty for the scrutinized speakers’ communicative possibilities. Regarding norm adherence, the partners in discourse seem to stretch the acceptance of linguistic variation to the very limits of the already diffuse linguistic system as long as social conduct and behavioural norms of communication are respected.