A Grammatical Description of Basari  (Oniyan)

Presentation

This book presents a grammatical overview of Basari (also written Bassari), a language spoken along the border between eastern Senegal and northern Guinea. The Bassari, who call themselves the Beliyan and their language Oniyan, were inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 2012 due to the authenticity of their culture.

Basari belongs to the Tenda group (alongside Bedik and Koniagui) of Atlantic languages (Niger-Congo phylum). It is tonal, and characterized by a noun classification system with consonant alternation and conjugation based on the opposition between complete/incomplete and aorist. This work describes one of Basari’s three dialectal variants: that spoken to the west of Kedougou (the Ane dialect).

This work was carried out as part of the Sénélangues programme (ANR 09 BLAN 0326) led by Stéphane Robert and Sylvie Voisin with the involvement of European and Senegalese researchers. One of its objectives was to describe and document minority languages in Senegal.

Author

Loïc-Michel Perrin is a lecturer at Inalco, where he teaches Wolof, and part of the LLACAN (Languages and Cultures of Africa) unit at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). After completing a doctorate in cognitive semantics focusing on representations of time in Wolof, he is now studying a relatively undocumented language, Basari, while continuing his Wolof research. 

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