Grammatical description of basari (oniyan)

Presentation

This book offers a grammatical sketch of Basari (also noted 'Bassari'), which is a language spoken on the border between eastern Senegal and northern Guinea. The Bassari, who call themselves Bëliyan and name their language oniyan, were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012 for the authenticity of their culture.

Basari belongs to the Tenda group (alongside Bedik or Coniagui) of the Atlantic language family (phylum Niger-Congo). It is a tonal language characterized by a system of nominal classes with consonantal alternation and by conjugations organized around the opposition accomplished/inaccomplished vs. aorist. Among the three dialectal variants of this language, the one corresponding to Basari spoken west of Kédougou (ane dialect) is described here.

This work was carried out as part of the Sénélangues (ANR 09 BLAN 0326) program directed by Stéphane Robert and Sylvie Voisin and involving European and Senegalese researchers. One of its aims was to provide a description and documentation of Senegal's minority languages.

Author

Loïc-Michel Perrin is a lecturer at Inalco, where he teaches Wolof and is attached to the CNRS LLACAN (Langage, langues et cultures d'Afrique noire) laboratory. After a PhD in cognitive semantics focusing on representations of time in Wolof, he undertook, while continuing his research on Wolof, the study of a little-described language, Basari.

184 pages
16 x 21 cm
Publication: 07/05/2019
ISBN: 9782858313105