Academic literature on the topic 'Fulfulde language'

Case Theory interacts with Government Theory in its operation and so, cases are assigned to the complements of governors. Case assigners are the governors of their dependent clauses while the case receivers are the governed NPs. So, the purpose of the study is to survey case assignment in Fulfulde generally by identifying and analysing the elements of Fulfulde structures and their relationship in terms of structural case. Unstructured observation was the method used for eliciting data for this study. Adequate and natural data were recorded and analysed sentence by sentence, the way they were uttered by the native speakers. The Theoretical Framework adopted for data analysis by this study is Principle and Parameters Theory. The study discovered that in Government, apart from (V)erbs, (P)repositions and tensed INFL, (N)ouns, (A)djectives and Focus Markers FMs can also govern and assign case to their complements in Fulfulde. The study has proved that in Fulfulde, cases can be assigned either to the left or to the right, depending on the relation.

In his efforts to communicate his research on African “tradition”—more specifically oral texts—Hampâté Bâ was faced with a choice of languages and alphabets. Much of his work appeared only in French, the language of his main formal education and administrative training. In collaboration with several French colonial scholar-administrators (Henri Gaden, Colonel R. Figaret, and Gilbert Vieillard) Hampâté Bâ eventually developed a system for writing his native Fulfulde in Roman characters. However for his own Fulfulde religious poetry (“mes seules oeuvres de ‘creation’”), Hampâté Bâ used Ajami (Arabic letters representing non-Arabic languages), a writing system that he also promoted as a medium of wider Fulbe literacy.

Why did a seventeenth-century scholar translate a Fulfulde text, that had long served to divulge Islamic theology in West Africa, into literary Arabic, a language that was only understood by people who were already advanced in their studies of the religion? This article explores whether his prime concern was not a translation from one language to the other, but the translation of an oral work into a written text.

Mobile communication has become an important part of everyday life in Senegal, and text messages have turned out to be highly multilingual. So far Senegalese language policy has supported the use of the official language, French, in education and in writing in general, while the majority language, Wolof, has dominated the oral sphere. As SMS texts tend to include use of Wolof and other African languages as well as French, the question is whether texting will pave the way for African language literacy practices. The aim of this article is to study texting’s potential impact on the status of African languages as written languages through the investigation of SMS messages written and received by fifteen students from Dakar. Ethnographic tools have been used to collect text messages in Wolof, Fulfulde and French, as well as English, Spanish and Arabic, and also data on the context of communication and on the writers’ and receivers’ interpretations of the use of different languages. The analysis shows that African languages are given different roles and values in texting, being used in monolingual messages, in functional codeswitching and in mixed code messages.

The purpose of this paper is to prove that intercultural relationship and sufficient contact between Hausa and other languages result in linguistic diffusion or borrowing. The study adopts both the historical and descriptive survey research design, predicated on the need for a brief history of Hausa and the donor languages, and descriptive design to facilitate the use of secondary data generated from textbooks, theses, dissertations, seminar and conference papers. The study traces the location of Hausa people in order to vividly comprehend the nature of contact with the donor languages which effectively bears on the objective nature of the borrowed words. It is in this light that three types of language relationship emerged: genetic, typological and cultural. The intercultural relationship can be unidirectional (English and Hausa) or bi-directional (Hausa and Yoruba). The work provides concrete examples from Tuareg, Fulfulde, Kanuri, Yoruba, Nupe, Arabic and English languages to demonstrate the long contact with the Hausa language. The study finally observes suppressive interference on the structures of Hausa especially from Arabic and English, which have attained second language status in Hausa society, which, again, does not make the language lose its originality.

This paper hypothesizes that such sociolinguistic identities as Kanuri, Shuwa Arabic, Fulfulde and Wandala which are all Cameroon languages are so much linked to Islam in Northern Cameroon that their development are parallel that of Islam in this part of the country. In order to verify this, observation, three hundred questionnaires and communication with Muslim faithful were used in three Friday mosques in Maroua, Garoua and Ngaoundere, the main cities of this half of the country. The second dimension of Spolky’s (2006) theory on language and religion was used as frame. The paper finds that there is mutuality between these languages and Islam not just due to historical factors, but also because of the influence on the making of a sociolinguistic repertoires and the building of (new) religious communities. As these linguistic identities are reminiscent of Islam, they stand as the main linguistic vehicles of Islam in Northern Cameroon.

This study applies the concepts of frames and performance roles (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Bauman 1993; Goffman 1974) to represented speech in personal narratives of speakers of Fulfulde, a Niger-Congo language of the (West) Atlantic group. Contextualization cues such as verbal suffixes indicating voice and aspect, person reference and references to states of knowledge index the frame of interaction between storyteller and audience, the frame of the narrated story, and an enacted frame that recontextualizes events within the story world. These cues also signal performance roles within the frame, such as the addressing self, the principal and the animator. The multiple frames and performance roles indexed by represented speech allow the speaker to represent past and present selves, and more importantly, to make an implicit comparison between the states of knowledge at various points in time in the performance of the narrative. In this way, the speaker distributes responsibility, blame and praise across multiple depictions of the self such that the one most accessible to the audience is portrayed as a superior representation of cultural ideals.

The city of Saayi (Say), Niger has played an important role in the regional development of Islam from the early nineteenth century onwards. This paper traces its history and the biography of the founder, using the available written and oral sources, while also describing its role as a contemporary religious centre. The Qur'an is commented on in local languages both in the context of traditional advanced religious education and in Ramaḍān. The intellectual sources, language and ritual dimensions of enunciation of these oral commentaries are analysed, as are the ceremonies specific to Ramaḍān. Although Say was founded by Fulfulde-speaking scholars, reflecting the general cultural and social evolution of the city and its area, for the past 50 years, the Qur'an commentary in the Friday mosque has been given in Songhay-Zarma. While these commentaries are essentially based on recognised Arabic ones, their language makes some reference to the images and concepts of local Songhay-Zarma culture. The linguistic features and substantive content of Songhay-Zarma oral tafsīr are illustrated by two excerpts, each presenting several verses of Sūrat al-Baqara: one is drawn from a full tafsīr collected in Say in 1968, at the initiative of the well-known statesman and man of letters Boubou Hama; the other was collected in the Zarma country in 1905–6.

Cameroon Pidgin English (abbreviated to CamP) is one of the languages of wider communication in Cameroon, a country second only to Papua New Guinea in terms of its multiplicity of languages for a relatively small population. CamP is used alongside other languages like English and French (official languages), Fulfulde, Arab Choa, Ewondo and Duala (lingua francas), and over 250 indigenous languages. What is, however, peculiar about CamP is that it is not restricted to a particular class of people or to people from a particular region. A language which arose as a result of the desperate need for a link language between people who spoke mutually unintelligible languages has now established itself as a major force to reckon with in the linguistic landscape of the country. One of the main preoccupations among researchers on CamP has been its relationship with Cameroon English (CamE), which has higher status. While CamE is an official language in the country's constitution, CamP enjoys covert prestige bestowed on it by Cameroonians as a language of wider communication, social interaction, intimacy, etc. However, Cameroonians have been given to understand that the coexistence of CamP and CamE is responsible for the falling standard of English in the country, as a result of which CamP should be eradicated at all costs. This attitude has led to the stigmatisation and intimidation of CamP speakers as educational authorities all over the country attempt to ban the language, and refer to it in such pejorative terms as bad English, poor English, bush English, join join English etc. Such hostility has tended to drive the language underground so that speakers rarely express their liking for the language overtly. They are suspicious of language authorities and thus have developed an ambivalent attitude towards anything that has to do with CamP. Thus if those speakers who use CamP daily as the main medium of communication were to be asked what they think about its status, functions and prospects, the results would be largely negative (Schröder, 2003), not because they do not like the language but simply because they have been intimidated and stigmatised. This ambivalence has caused serious methodological difficulties for researchers, which have marred most results of studies on the functions, status and prospects of CamP. The inability to adopt an appropriate methodology to research the topic has given rise to conflicting findings and statements on the relationship between CamP and CamE, some of which are sometimes truly baffling (see Ngefac & Sala, 2006; Ayafor, 2005; Kouega, 2001; Chia, 2009). Researchers insensitive to the situation carry out research on CamP and obtain results that paint a completely distorted picture of the situation on the ground. In this light, certain basic questions about this relationship remain to be settled: What is actually the relationship between CamP and CamE? Is CamP really facing death? Is CamP losing ground to CamE? Is CamP soon going to lose its identity and idiosyncrasies to CamE or is CamP going to supplant CamE? This paper will consider how various researchers have grappled with these questions. By analysing their statements, it will attempt to explain the controversies that have characterised research on the relationship between CamP and CamE thus far.