CONTRIBUTION TO MANDINKA DIALECTOLOGY – BASSE MANDINKA VERSUS STANDARD GAMBIAN MANDINKA

• Authors: Andrason Alexander
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article provides a detailed overview of the most distinctive features of Basse Mandinka (a Mandinka variety used in Basse, the capital of the Upper River Division in the easternmost part of Gambia) as compared with Standard Gambian Mandinka (a normalized Mandinka language, widely employed in Gambia). Based upon his own original fieldwork dedicated to Basse Mandinka, the author lists all the dissimilarities between the two tongues, whether they concern phonetics and phonology, lexicon, morphology and morphosyntax, as well as the usage (i.e. an exact range of functional and semantic properties of certain grams). The author concludes that despite the profound similarity of the Mandinka varieties in question, their differences are not insignificant and span across all the levels of the two systems, from the referential vocabulary to the core grammar.

Keywords

EN

LINGUISTICS; WEST-AFRICAN LANGUAGES; DIALECTOLOGY; MANDINKA; MANDING

• Publisher: Institute of Oriental Studies, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Asian and African Studies
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 23
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 110 – 139

Contributors

author

Andrason Alexander

• Department of African Languages, University of Stellenbosch Matieland, 7602, South Africa