Manding

La disponibilité des corpus électroniques annotés comptant des millions de mots pour les langues maninka et bambara permet de penser des dictionnaires de nouvelle génération. Dans un tel dictionnaire, l'élaboration de la polysémie, combinabilité, valences syntaxiques, caractéristiques stylistiques, régionales et dialectales pour chaque lexème (et pour chaque sens du lexème) sera basée sur l'analyse du concordancier dérivé du corpus. Désormais, il devient possible d'évaluer statistiquement chaque trait caractéristique du lexème. Une analyse lexicographique, sur la base des concordanciers, est présenté sur l'exemple des lexèmes bambara bánban et jàhadi.

Masyarakat wilayah perdesaan di Jawa mayoritas bekerja pada sektor pertanian. Meskipun begitu, sektor pertanian tidak menjamin kesejahteraan masyarakat perdesaan di Jawa karena kemiskinan melingkupi hampir sebagian besar masyarakat yang bekerja pada sektor tersebut. Akibatnya, para petani kecil dan miskin di beberapa daerah di Jawa mencoba menerapkan strategi ekonomi untuk bertahan dari kemiskinan yang semakin memburuk. Beberapa diantaranya ialah dengan mengkonversi lahan pertanian dan beralih ke sektor non-pertanian. Namun, konversi lahan pertanian menjadi penggunaan lahan untuk sektor non pertanian ternyata bersifat dualisme. Di satu sisi, konversi lahan dapat memberikan dampak positif yakni mempercepat pertumbuhan ekonomi yang berarti meningkatkan pendapatan daerah dan penyerapan tenaga kerja. Namun, di sisi lain, konversi lahan pertanian menyebabkan dampak negatif berupa menurunnya poduktivitas pertanian dimana hal ini menyebabkan sempitnya lapangan pekerjaan di sektor pertanian sebagai petani serta juga berakibat pada penurunan produktivitas pangan. Salah satu contoh perubahan penggunaan lahan dan mata pencaharian masyarakat pedesaan di Jawa adalah Dusun Manding, Desa Sabdodadi, Kecamatan Bantul, Yogyakarta. Sebelumnya, wilayah tersebut merupakan wilayah dengan mayoritas penduduknya bekerja pada sektor pertanian, hingga pada tahun 1957 muncul industri kerajinan kulit. Berawal dari beberapa pemuda Manding yang pergi ke Yogyakarta dan bekerja pada sebuah perusahaan kerajinan kulit di Rotowijayan, sebuah kampung dekat Kraton,Yogyakarta pada tahun 1947. Setelah sepuluh tahun, meraka pulang dan mencoba untuk membuka usaha sendiri. Keberadaan indsutri kerajinan kulit di Dusun Manding hanyalah sebagian kecil dari maraknya industri di Kabupaten Bantul. Dari tahun ke tahun, perkembangan sektor non-pertanian di Bantul semakin meningkat dan hal ini membuktikan semakin berkurangnya lahan pertanian.

This article explores one structural way in which Jula differs from other Manding varieties: the forgoing of formally reflexive constructions in favor of formally ambiguous intransitive constructions and more rarely innovative idiomatic transitive constructions. To do so, I draw on contextually elicited forms from 2012 fieldwork with 9 Jula speakers in Burkina Faso. Given the limitations of elicitation, I explore wider acceptability judgments and text artifacts to reveal that Jula speakers in Burkina frequently recognize and in fact use formally reflexive constructions typically attributed to other Manding varieties such as Bamanan. These findings suggest that these so-called Bamanan constructions are enregistered (Agha 2007) for a certain social domain as sociolinguistic high-forms. This study thereby reveals the limitations of a traditional dialectology approach to understanding how various Manding forms circulate across isomorphic boundaries.

Ajami (عجمي) is a term frequently used to refer to the use of the Arabic script to write sub-Saharan African languages. West African lingua francas such as Hausa, Wolof, and Fulani have a rather well-documented record of Ajami artifacts and use. In Eastern Manding varieties such as Bamanan and Jula, however, Ajami practices and texts have been viewed as rather limited in comparison. Recent 2012 fieldwork in Burkina Faso however suggests that Ajami practices in Jula have simply escaped the notice of the Western scholarly community. Drawing on ethnographic fieldnotes about production of Esoteric Islamic medicinal treatment recipes in addition to dialogues, descriptions and songs produced at my request, I explore Jula Ajami as a grassroots literacy existing alongside the Koranic schooling tradition. Turning to the texts themselves, I analyze the graphic system in use as well as the linguistic characteristics that suggest the enregisterment of Kong Jula as appropriate in Jula Ajami texts.

В течение последнего десятилетия были созданы миллионные корпуса текстов манинка и бамана. Параллельно с этим ведется работа по созданию и совершенствованию словарей этих языков. Складываются условия для вывода лексикографической работы на принципиально новый уровень, который имел бы целью создание «корпусных словарей» (corpus-driven dictionaries). Это позволило бы гораздо детальнее и достовернее, по сравнению с «традиционными» словарями, представлять полисемию лексем, их сочетаемостные свойства, стилистические и регионально-диалектные характеристики каждого значения. В статье дается пробная разработка структуры словарной статьи глагола bánban на основании Справочного корпуса бамана.

Письменность нко для языков манден (в первую очередь, для гвинейского манинка) была изобретена в 1949 году и получила широкое распространение. Особенно быстро его популярность растёт в последние десятилетия - в первую очередь в Гвинее, но также и в Мали, и в других странах ареала манден. Сегодня письменность нко практически вытеснила латинскую графику для манинка в Гвинее, и составляет серьёзную конференцию ей в Мали.

GHANA: Ghana is one of the earliest African polities south of the Sahara to be mentioned in written sources. The period of its foundation remain unclear, possibly the 5th or 6th c. CE. After the conquest of North Africa by Arab Muslims and the subsequent remodeling of trans-Saharan exchanges, it appears as one of the main actors on the African side of the trade. Al-Fazari, a geographer who lived in the second half of the 8th c. CE, is the first author to mention the polity Ghana in a work now lost, but quoted by al-Masudi (ca. 896-956 CE) in his description of the world entitled The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems. In all the early Arabic texts, Ghana is presented as rich in gold, although it was a gateway for metal produced in distant areas rather than a gold producing centre itself [...]

KAABU: Kaabu (also spelt Kabu, Gabu or Gabou) was a polity located in the hinterland of Upper Guinea that probably emerged in the 13th century and controlled an important area of territory, especially during the period of the transatlantic trade. Because of its Mande roots, the history of Kaabu has often been interpreted as that of a western province of the Mali Empire, which became autonomous after the imperial matrix disintegrated by the end of the 16th century. It collapsed definitively in 1867, defeated by the Fula of the Imamate of Futa Jallon at the Battle of Kansala. Its territory was later shared among French, English, and Portuguese colonies at the end of the 19th century [...]

NOK: An archaeological complex—also referred to as Nok culture—in Central Nigeria that evolved between 1500 and the end of the first century BCE, first described by colonial administrative officer and archaeologist Bernard Fagg in the mid-1940s. It takes its name from a tin-mining village located in the south of modern Kaduna State of Nigeria, where the first clay figurines representing animals and humans that would become synonymous with this complex were recovered [...]

MAPUNGUBWE: Mapungubwe is a settlement site located in the Limpopo province at the northern border of South Africa with Zimbabwe and Botswana, and at the confluence of the Limpopo—second-largest river in East Africa—and Shashe rivers. It is thought to have been the last capital of a polity—sometimes referred to as the Kingdom of Mapungubwe or as Southern Africa’s first state—which controlled the area in the 13th century. The site and its surroundings, extending over an area of about 300 km2, form the Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape, which was classified by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2003 and is part of the Mapungubwe National Park, established in 1995. In 2009, the park became part of the Limpopo–Shashe Transfrontier Conservation Area, which covers 5900 km2 spread between South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe [...]

Esta dissertação consiste na análise das mudanças sociais, políticas, culturais e econômicas ocorrida entre os habitantes das margens do rio Gâmbia – fulas, mandingas e jalofos – diante do impacto provocado pelo comércio atlântico no período entre 1580 e 1630. Para isso, foram utilizados três tipos de documentação - os relatos de viagem de André Álvares Almada, escrito em 1594, Richard Jobson, escrito em 1623, André Donelha, escrito em 1625, e Pieter Van den Broecke escrito em 1630, as cartas de missionários e a documentação administrativa referente ao arquipélago de Cabo Verde, referentes ao período entre 1580 e 1630, (as duas últimas publicadas na obra Monumenta Missionária Africana, coligida pelo padre Antônio Brásio). Além disso, esta pesquisa procura demonstrar quais eram os produtos de circulação atlântica no rio Gâmbia, bem como os portos onde ocorria o comércio nesse rio. Analisando os agentes que participaram deste comércio, procurou-se também discutir o protagonismo comercial dos fulas, mandingas e jalofos em relação aos comerciantes europeus.

(первая часть статьи, вторая половина вышла в 2005) Сулемана Канте (1922–1987), изобретатель оригинального письма нко для языка манинка (Республика Гвинея и соседние страны), был одновременно и создателем письменной литературы манинка, а также литературного языка манинка. Анализ произведений Сулемана Канте показывает, что он был и философом утопистом, во взглядах которого причудливо совместился ислам и доисламское мировоззрение народов Западной Африки.

A model for the development of a corpus-driven spelling dictionary for the Bambara language is described. First, a list of about 4000 lexemes characterized by spelling variability is extracted from an electronic Bambara-French dictionary. At the next stage, a script is applied to determine the number of occurrences of each spelling variant in the Bambara Reference Corpus, separately for the entire Corpus (more than 11 million words) and for its disambiguated subcorpus (about 1.5 million words). Statistics on the diversity of sources and authors are also obtained automatically. The statistical data are then sorted manually into two lists of lexemes: those whose standard spelling can be established statistically, and those requiring evaluation by expert linguists. Some difficult cases are discussed in the paper. At the final stage, a representative expert commission will discuss all those lexemes for which statistical data alone do not suffice to define a standard spelling variant, before taking a final decision on each. The resulting Bambara spelling dictionary will be published electronically and on paper.

Free access through the attached link.

ABSTRACT:
Since at least the rise of nineteenth-century European nationalism, Westerners have in large part judged languages by whether they are written and standardized (Anderson 2006; Bauman and Briggs 2000; Blommaert 2006; Flores 2014). As the colonial era came to an end across much of the world in the 1960s, this tendency intermingled with the rising interest in development: what would be the place of the long minoritized indigenous languages of Africa, Asia and Latin America in the educational and political projects of postcolonial states? In Africa in particular, this led to a flourishing of orthographies for a large number of languages which had previously been excluded from domains of government and schooling. The initiatives of the post-independence period, however, did not lead to one single orthography, script or standard for many of these languages. This chapter examines one such case, the West African trade language of Manding, which is written in at least three distinct scripts today: Arabic, N’ko (ߒߞߏ) and Latin. Emerging respectively from before, during and after colonial rule, these three writing systems are variably embraced and wielded by distinct West African actors today.

What exactly was Sulemaana Kantè doing when he invented a non-Latin-, non-Arabic-based script, N’ko, for writing his mother-tongue of Manding in 1949 in French West Africa? In this paper I argue that Kantè’s language planning was a clear move in a quest for social change. Seizing on the implementational and ideological space that opened following World War II in French West Africa, Kantè directly challenged the institutional language policies of both the Koranic and the French colonial schooling systems. In the Koranic system, language proficiency was of secondary concern; the main goal was making proper Muslims. Only the most advanced students learned Arabic and thereby joined the elite and influential clerical class. The French system, on the other hand, took the dissemination of French and repression of Arabic to be central to their goal of creating ideal colonial subjects. Kantè was not alone in questioning the hierarchies engendered by these systems. N’ko must also be understood as emerging in response to Kantè’s contemporaries in both the Islamic and political spheres of the post-War moment. Analyzing Kantè’s own background and trajectory, I argue that his efforts were a particular iteration of Afro-Muslim thought that flirted with ethno-nationalism and used mother-tongue medium of instruction to offer a vision of West African society that was distinct from a major educational reform movement of his day: the madrasa movement that opted for Arabic-based education.

"Le capverdien (ou créole du Cap-Vert) est la langue maternelle de plus d'un million de personnes dans le monde, vivant en République du Cap-Vert ou originaires de ce pays.
S'il est vrai que le créole capverdien tire une grande partie de sa substance du portugais, il est tout aussi indéniable que la langue créole du Cap-Vert contient de nombreux mots et structures grammaticales issus de diverses langues africaines.
Le présent ouvrage fait le point sur l'importance et la valeur de cet élément africain présent dans la langue capverdienne. Il montre, en utilisant des arguments linguistiques et historiques, que le créole du Cap-Vert peut légitimement être considéré comme une langue afro-portugaise et souligne les liens profonds qui continuent d'unir la langue capverdienne et les idiomes parlés par les ancêtres africains des Capverdiens d'aujourd'hui."