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Dogon and Bangi Me Linguistics

Overview

This is the website for a project on Dogon languages, also including the Bangi Me language (a language isolate spoken by a culturally Dogon group). The Principal Investigator is Jeffrey Heath of the University of Michigan. Other fieldworkers are (or have been) Kirill Prokhoroff, Laura McPherson, Abbie Hantgan, and the late Stefan Elders. Steven Moran developed and is administering the website. Our year-round assistant in Mali is Minkailou Djiguiba. For further information about these project members, click HERE.

Initial funding for Heath's work on Jamsay in the period 2004-06 was from the National Endowment for the Humanities (grant PA 50643-04). Primary funding for the expanded Dogon project in the period 2006-08 is from the National Science Foundation (grant BCS-0537435). Prokhoroff is partially funded by a stipend from the Linguistics Dept. of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig). McPherson is partially funded by a Fulbright fellowship. Hantgan received modest supplementary funding from the Indiana University. Heath has received substantial help, principally in the form of released time, from the University of Michigan. All of this support is gratefully acknowledged.

There are approximately twenty Dogon languages, but many Dogon villages are in inaccessible locations, and their languages and dialects have not been fully surveyed. For a list of Dogon languages, based on our current understanding, and their place in the current project, click HERE. Depending on future funding, we hope to complete by 2014 the documentation and analysis (reference grammar, lexicography, texts, images) of all of these languages and to present the material in an integrated fashion.

Please excuse us for glitches and gaps as we work to complete and integrate this website. We expect to have a considerably more complete website based on already collected data by the end of 2008, and it will continue to grow as new data are collected.

For Dogon lexicography, use the tabs "thesaurus" (for top-down lexical data organized by semantic domain), "search" (to locate Dogon words cued by a simple English finder word or short phrase), and "alphabetical" (for Dogon vocabulary based on an alphabetical English finder-list word or phrase). Note also that most of the video clips and photos are correlated with lexical items, as their file numbers begin with the numerical codes for semantic domains and subdomains used in the thesaurus.

Use the tab "manuscripts" to find pdf's of unpublished (and generally unfinished) reference grammars, Hantgan's critical bibliography of Dogon linguistics, and other materials as we produce them (they will be withdrawn from the website on publication).

We have spent a great deal of energy collecting and identifying flora and fauna specimens. Under the tab "flora-fauna" we will be presenting identification guides (or comments supplementing published guides), beginning with flora. These guides include links to images and descriptions from many other websites. We are also working to make available on this site our already large collection of photos of flora and (to a lesser extent) fauna.

Our lexicographic fieldwork is based primarily on a lexical elicitation spreadsheet with English and French glosses. For an Excel version of this, click HERE. The list is constantly evolving as glosses are added, subtracted, and modified. This list does not currently include certain lexical domains that present problems for cross-linguistically accurate glossing or that are intrinsically local rather than pan-Dogon: flora, fauna, animal colors (including many borrowed from Fulfulde), personal names, place names, Dogon names for Islamic lunar months, names of days in traditional 5- or 6-day weeks, names of local dances and other rituals, hairstyles, and greetings. We will eventually incorporate some of these into the main spreadsheet (from which the lexical data on this website is generated), and will present others as separate datasets.

There is a time lag between updates of the underlying spreadsheet and updates of the lexical pages within this website.

For a skeletal template for reference grammars of Dogon languages, click HERE. Obviously the organization will be modified to fit the contours of any particular language, and to suit the predilections of any given author.

There is room for more fieldworkers on Dogon languages and we welcome correspondence from interested parties, ranging from college graduates to post-docs.


Project Members (alphabetical)

Since 2005 our year-round Malian assistant and factotum has been Minkailou Djiguiba. He was Heath's primary Jamsay research assistant, especially in 2005 and 2006. He now runs the project's base in Douentza and provides logistical support for all of the fieldworkers.

Stefan Elders, a Dutch post-doc trained at University of Leiden (Netherlands) and active as a research associate at the University of Bayreuth (Germany) joined the project in September 2006 to work on Bangi Me in the village of Bounou. His tragic death in Mali due to a sudden illness in February 2007 was a devastating blow to West African linguistics (never mind our project). In his short lifetime he did extensive fieldwork in Cameroon and Burkina Faso, made important contributions to Gur and West Atlantic linguistics, and was in the process of becoming one of the two or three leading authorities on West African linguistics. This website presents the materials we were able to salvage from his work on Bangi Me: a handout he prepared for a workshop on Dogon languages in Bamako December 2006, and scans from his notebooks (courtesy of the Elders family). The original notebooks are archived at the University of Leiden library. We are also in possession of two partially recorded cassettes, some flora specimens, and a number of ethnographic photographs that will process and disseminate.

Abbie Hantgan, a graduate student in Linguistics at Indiana University, was then recruited to carry on the vitally important study of Bangi Me begun by Elders. She has excellent credentials for this work, having been a Peace Corps volunteer for several years, based initially in the village of Koira Beiri (Najamba-Kindige-Bondu language area) and then in Mopti-Sevare. She is fluent in Fulfulde, which is invaluable as a lingua franca in the Bangi Me villages. Abbie did initial fieldwork in Bounou June-August 2008, and plans to return in summer 2009 and for a longer stint in calendar year 2010.

Jeff Heath, Linguistics, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) is a veteran of more than 12 years of fieldwork. He began with Australian Aboriginal languages of eastern Arnhem Land (1970's), then did various topical projects on Jewish and Muslim dialects of Maghrebi Arabic (1980's). Since 1989 he has made annual field trips to Mali where he worked in succession on Hassaniya Arabic, riverine Songhay languages (Koyra Chiini, Koyraboro Senni), montane Songhay languages (Tondi Songway Kiini, Humburi Senni), Tamashek (Berber family). From 2004 to the present he has studied the Dogon languages Jamsay, Beni, Walo, Tabi-Sarinyere, Nanga, and Najamba. He plans to work in the coming years on Yanda-Dom, Tebul Ure, Bunoge (Korandabo), and Tiranige-Diga (Duleri). His most recent book is Grammar of Jamsay (Mouton, 2008).

Laura McPherson is a recent graduate of Scripps College where she worked with Africanist Mary Paster (of nearby Pomona College). She was admitted into the UCLA Linguistics PhD program but deferred her arrival until fall 2009. In the interim, i.e. June 2008 to May 2009, she is in Mali working on the Tommo-So language, with support from our project (summer 2008) and from the Fulbright Foundation (October to May). In Mali she is dividing her time between the village of Tongo-Tongo (on the plateau) and our base in Douentza.

Steven Moran, a veteran of the Eastern Michigan University Linguist List and E-MELD team and now an advanced Ph.D. student in Computational Linguistics and Language Documentation at the University of Washington, created and is managing this website. He plans to do fieldwork on Toro-So as a post-doc in 2010 and hopefully in summer 2009. He previously did fieldwork in Ghana and has recently published a grammatical sketch of Western Sisaala.

Kirill Prokhorov is a Russian M.A. graduate and Ph.D. candidate who has been trained by West African specialists and field-oriented typologists in Moscow and St. Petersburg. He is working on the Mombo (= Kolu-So) language with a base in the beautiful village of Songho just west of Bandiagara, from January to December 2008. In January 2009 he will be a visiting scholar for one month at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, which has also provided him with a stipend to support his 2008 fieldwork. He hopes to return to Dogon country in summer 2009 and during calendar year 2010 to work on Ampari and Dogul-Dom languages.


Inventory of Dogon languages

There is much to be learned about Dogon languages and the inventory given here is tentative.

The inventory below of Dogon languages is based partially on our own work and partially on the literature, primarily the SIL survey and the survey work by Roger Blench (see links at end). The groupings are (crudely) geographical, with no implications for genetic subgrouping. Heath is or plans to be working on northeastern, north-central, and north-western languages. McPherson is working on Tommo-So (central plateau). Prokhorov is or plans to be working on Mombo and Ampari (west-central) and Dogulu-Dom (central plateau). Moran plans to work on Toro-So (eastern cliffs). Prospective new fieldworkers might focus on the more southerly languages or on Ana (north-central).

Several of the terms in common use in the literature are compounds ending in -Kan, -So, -Tegu, etc. These compound finals means 'speech, language', and one can question whether they are necessary. (The purists who insist on such redundant expressions would presumably insist on saying Bahasa Indonesia, Langue Française, etc., instead of Indonesian and French.) For some of the northeastern languages we are using geographical names (Beni, Walo, Tabi-Sarinyere) at least for the time being. One issue about using native terms is that they may turn out not to be in use throughout the language zone ("Bondu" is a good example), or they may be casual descriptive terms like 'mountain language' that serve in a local zone to differentiate a language from that spoken in an adjacent zone (e.g. the plains).

The links to SIL and Blench on Dogon languages are:

Bangi Me (Bangeri Me) is probably a language isolate, and is not included in the Dogon inventory. On Bangi Me see Blench's remarks:


Dogon templates


Technical specifications

To view phonetic data on this site, you should have a Unicode-based font installed on your computer. Data presented here are best viewed with SIL's freely available Charis SIL or Doulos SIL fonts.

We are using Coldfusion 8 to bring users free PDF dictionaries that are generated on-the-fly from the Dogon lexical database. The lexical data is stored in a Unicode-compliant MySQL 5 database.

©2009 Jeffrey Heath