RCNL: a dream in the linguistic wild west

The online publication Ethnologue counts precisely 517 of them. In reality, nobody knows their exact number. These languages can be grouped into an equally unknown number of language families, most of which belong in one way or another to the Niger-Congo macro-family, with the exception of Chadic and Ijoid languages, Kanuri and a few putative isolates. According to a recent bibliometric study, we currently have a grammatical study for only 17% of Nigerian languages, compared with an average of 30% in Africa and 31% worldwide. Moreover, there are several language families of which no member has been the subject of a grammatical study, such as the Wurbo or Jarawan groups.

This situation inspired two researchers from the Llacan (CNRS-Inalco), Mark Van de Velde and Dmitry Idiatov, to switch to the study of Nigerian minority languages when they were recruited to the CNRS. With the support of the IFRA (Institut français de recherche en Afrique), we were able to carry out a pilot mission in northern Adamawa State in 2011. The purpose of this mission was to establish contacts with local communities, select a language to study, and verify the sociolinguistic situation in this part of the Benue Valley. On the latter point, it turned out that most of the region's minority languages are under strong pressure from the Hausa language, which is used almost universally among children at play, for example.


A rich variety of languages but too few researchers

On the other hand, there is a very strong desire among local language communities to preserve and cultivate their mother tongues. This is demonstrated, for example, by the amateur researchers who compile collections of proverbs or dictionaries, often accompanied by folklore treatises. We were able to attend a major event organized in the village of Dumne to celebrate the publication of the book Yungur Heritage: culture, tradition and chiefdom and to raise funds to compensate the work of its author, Manliura Datilo Philemon. Community interest was considerable. There were hundreds of participants, including notables from Yola, the state capital, and Abuja, the federal capital. The sums raised were impressive, a very tangible sign of the esteem in which this kind of effort is held.

In virtually every language community in the region, there is also a language committee, set up to translate the New Testament or to propose an orthography. These committees are often supervised by one of the Protestant missionary organizations active in the region, which offer workshops in translation, phonological analysis or orthography creation on site or in the city of Jos. For some years now, a theological faculty affiliated to the Federal University of Jos, the TCNN (Theological College of Northern Nigeria), has been offering a comprehensive training course (BaMa) in documentation and linguistic analysis, which is of excellent quality. It attracts students from local language committees, some of whom finance the language studies of a young member. Finally, each of the communities we visited on our pilot mission gave us a warm and enthusiastic welcome, and asked us to study their language. It was particularly painful not to be able to respond positively to most of them, due to lack of time and resources, but we promised to do our best to develop linguistic research in the region.

We have chosen bena-yungur (ẽ́ː ɓə́nāː, glottocode: kwaa1262)* as the object of in-depth study, a language of the bena-mboi group, which itself belongs to the set of languages grouped under the label adamawa. In the internal classifications of the Niger-Congo macro-family, the Adamawa languages appear as a family, but their genealogical unity has never been demonstrated, for lack of sufficient data and intermediate reconstruction efforts. Bena-Yungur is spoken in northeastern Nigeria, a few dozen kilometers north of the Benue River and east of its tributary Gongola, in the Song local government area. In addition to a number of scientific publications on the language, we have produced a dictionary application for the community, searchable on phone and downloadable free of charge from Google Play Store (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.efl.labex.bena). As the part of Nigeria north of the Benue River became inaccessible due to insecurity immediately after our pilot mission, we had to work with research assistants from the Bena-Yungur community. Our main assistant, Mr. Bitrus Andrew, records texts in the bena-yungur villages and comes to work with us for a few weeks every year in southwestern Nigeria.


Since 2011, we have been able to secure several externally-funded projects, including the project AdaGram, led by Dmitry Idiatov and funded by the City of Paris as part of its programme Emergence(s) and the project Areal phenomena in Northern sub-Saharan Africa, an Axe 3 operation of LabEx EFL. These projects have enabled us to hire four PhD students whose research focuses on the documentation and grammatical analysis of previously unstudied Adamawa languages. Mirjam Möller is currently finalizing her thesis on the Baa language (glottocode: kwaa1262), spoken in the Kwah and Gyakan villages in an inaccessible part of Adamawa State. She has worked mainly with the Baa diaspora in the city of Lagos. Eveling Villa, Jakob Lesage and Lora Litvinova are currently carrying out grammatical analysis of the languages nyesam (glottocode: kpas1242), kam (glottocode: kamm1249) and wam (glottocode: kuga1239), respectively.


Invaluable local support

Their work was prepared by a pilot mission carried out by a small Nigerian team consisting of Mr Tope Olagunju, a Nigerian student, and Mr Bitrus Andrew, our bena-yungur research assistant. The aim of this mission was to collect lexical data on five languages that were classified as "adamawa" in the literature, but for which we had no data. The breathtaking results of this small mission illustrate the frontier aspect of linguistic research in Nigeria. One of the languages to be examined was known as Laka in the literature (glottocode: Laka1252), classified in the Mbum group of the Adamawa family, and spoken in the town of Lau, Taraba State. On their return from the mission, our collaborators reported that there are two linguistic communities in Lau, which do not understand each other and are in conflict. Tope and Bitrus were able to collect lexical data on one of these languages, Lau Laka. It turned out to be a central Sudanic language (i.e. not part of the Niger-Congo group), whose closest relative is spoken 700 km to the east, in southern Chad. The identity of the other language spoken in Lau would have remained unknown, had we not learned by chance that two janitors at the school opposite our field accommodation in the town of Ilorin were originally from Lau, a happy coincidence considering that Lau is 1000 km from Ilorin. The two young people claimed to be native speakers of their ancestral language, which they call Win Lau, but we soon realized that most of the words and phrases they gave us were in Hausa. We were able to call on the services of a visiting uncle who had a good command of the language. An initial analysis of the lexicon suggests that this is a language of the Wurbo sub-group of the Jukunoid family, a sub-group about which we know almost nothing. In short, the "adamawa" language known in the literature as Laka, turns out to be two unrelated languages, neither of which belongs to the adamawa group, whatever its delimitation, and one of which is totally unique to Nigeria.

Developing linguistics locally and building a research center

Thanks to teamwork with native speakers, the problems associated with insecurity in northwest Nigeria are therefore not insurmountable. On the other hand, it is clear that the number of linguists working on Nigeria's minority languages is far too small to expect significant advances in the study of the extraordinary linguistic diversity waiting to be discovered in this region. That's why in 2013 we agreed to go and teach linguistics at a recently founded university in south-western Nigeria, near the town of Ilorin, to help train a new generation of Nigerian linguists. With the support of the president of this university and the head of the linguistics department, we developed a project to set up a research center for Nigerian languages, the RCNL (Research Centre for Nigerian Languages). This center is conceived as a kind of research hotel, where teams of researchers (Nigerian and international), speakers and students can live and work in ideal conditions and in complete safety. Once built, the center should be self-sufficient thanks to externally-funded projects and boarding fees for foreign researchers.

The university had secured funding from the Nigerian federal government and we began looking for an architect. After studying a few options, we settled on a firm of young Belgian architects who specialize in sustainable construction and had already completed a few projects in sub-Saharan Africa, including a small communal library in Burundi, built entirely from local materials and partly using local techniques that were disappearing. A team of architects came to Nigeria to look at the terrain and take soil samples at various locations near the university to study their composition, so that they could produce high-quality bricks on site. They came up with a superb architectural design, of a building divided into a residential part, a public part and a support part, organized around courtyards and interior gardens that provide natural ventilation.

We were well aware of the risks involved in this project, risks that we tried to anticipate as much as possible, but which ended up sinking the project. At the outset, the fact that our affiliate university in Nigeria was young seemed to us to be an advantage, since it would enable us to influence the development of research policy and implement best practices from the outset. In reality, the absence of a research culture or ambition greatly complicated our work. These complications proved impossible to resolve, and would multiply once the Center got underway. The contract with the architects was constantly modified on site, even after it had been signed by all the partners, and the architects were never paid. Despite our efforts, the construction contract was awarded to a company that was not selected on the basis of its skills. Once work had begun, the architects sent two interns to monitor the site, in support of the local architectural firm that had been imposed on us. As soon as they arrived, work was stopped, only to resume immediately after their departure two months later. The part of the building that was completed bears little resemblance to the design and is totally unusable.

At the same time, the idea of RCNL generated a lot of interest in Nigeria, and just as it became clear that things were untenable at Ilorin, the linguistics department at University of Ibadan (UI) invited us to consider re-founding RCNL at their place. UI is the best university in Nigeria, also located in the southwest of the country, and where security is less of a problem. It is a partner university of Inalco and hosts the IFRA (Institut français de recherche en Afrique), a UMIFRE (Unité mixte des instituts français de recherche à l'étranger) funded by the CNRS and the MEAE (Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires étrangères) which has always supported our research in Nigeria. Our colleagues at UI are currently seeking the necessary funding to realize the RCNL building on their campus.

The dream of making a quantitative and qualitative leap in linguistic research in Nigeria therefore remains alive. If our colleagues at UI can secure the funding needed to build the infrastructure, we'll be ready to start the research in full force, thanks to our network of local committees, the students trained at TCNN (Theological College of Northern Nigeria) and the young PhDs trained under the AdaGram project.


Mark Van de Velde



*The glottocode is a unique identifier for any language family or variety mentioned in the literature. This code is assigned by the Glottolog catalog (https://glottolog.org/), a catalog of the world's languages, inspired, among other things, by WebCal (http://reflex.cnrs.fr/Lexiques/webcal/index.html), the catalog of African languages developed at Llacan by Guillaume Segerer.