The influence of Jola Eegima'a on french in Senegal

4- REVIEW OF THE RELATED LITERATURE

As pointed out by Yasmine Marzouk (1993), after the era of great monographs by Louis-Vincent Thomas in Ethnology (1959) or by Paul Pelissier in Human

13 Spanglish is a word coined to label the language composed of the mix of Spanish and English same case as Frenglish which is the mixture of French and English.

¹⁴ Henri Boyer. 2001. Introduction à la Sociolinguistique. Paris: Dunod. Page 70

Geography (1966): Ç La bibliographie sur les Djola pèche plutTMt par son abondance et par son éclatement, comme si les auteurs avaient adopté la structure de l 'objet étudié È [The bibliography on Djola is full of get-up-and-go rather by its abundance and its bursting, as if the authors had adopted the structure of the studied object].

Considerable works related to the Djola language and people in general and the Eegimaa dialect in particular, were consulted for the working out of this part of our research.

This part, as its name suggests, is an inventory of fixtures but also a central and essential part of every academic research. Mbaya (1999:21) understood that and stated it clearly saying the following: «this stage is essential since it helps to master the field of investigation and methodologies and to generate hypotheses or questions for further studies ». This stage is also important in so far as it allows us to set down the relationship between the existing document and our project and also helps us diminish the risk of coming up with unreliable conclusions.

Concerning the sociolinguistic situation of Senegal as a whole, Mbaya (2005) in his last work entitled Pratiques et Attitudes Linguistiques dans le Sénégal d'Aujourd'hui carried out a meticulous analysis on the situation of language use and attitude in Senegal and it appears in the light of his conclusions that the diversity of the national parlances is at the origin of a vast complex network of influences and interferences.

This work could be useful for us for a good reading of the current Senegalese sociolinguistic situation since it is, to some extent, an update of the relational life of the languages (official and vernacular) in Senegal.

In his book published in 1983 and entitled Le Francais et les Langues Africaines au Sénégal, and most precisely in the second part: chapter five, page 196, Pierre Dumont talks about languages in contact and does a clear and concise exposé of the diversity of the languages in presence.

This work will particularly call our attention because it presents the situation of the contact between the official language and the other national languages but focuses most on Wolof and Serer in some parts. Our interest in this study will be to push on further and try to see the real relationship between Djola and French in Senegal.

On the typically regional level, Caroline Juillard (1995) in her study carried out on the town of Ziguinchor, tried to bring out the major issues for an efficient management of multilingualism in urban environment. Her greater merit would be to be

able to decline two issues as well micro as macro-sociolinguistic, to have gone in search of the linguistic life of Ziguinchor citizens without any particular preconceived idea.

This work will be for us of great academic importance in so far as it describes the complex reality of multilingualism in action in the everyday life of the townsmen. It poses the problematics of the emergence of new models of behaviour within a composite society in rapid change, with fast and unstable influences.

Another work carried out on the Eegimaa population itself is that of Paolo Palmeri published in 1995 and entitled Retour dans un Village Diola de Casamance: Chronique d'une Recherche Anthropologique au Sénégal. In this book, the author, as a good anthropologist, penetrates deeply in the way of life of the Djola people of Mof Avi. The work of Palmeri is characterized by its ethnographic quality. Basing himself on a vast quantitative survey carried out in the majority of the villages of the area, he delivers invaluable data on the composition of the population and collects several oral versions of the history of the settlement in Mof çvi starting from the emigration of the inhabitants from Burofay.

Among the various works devoted to Eegimaa so far, we can add Sambou's «Approche phonologique du Djola Eegimaa» (1989). In this article, the author describes the phonology of Eegimaa. He provides phonological tables for both vowel and consonant phonemes, discusses the realizations of the phonemes as well as the various phonetic environments which condition the different allophones. Sambou also devises some morphophonological rules for an 'accurate transcription' of Djola Eegimaa. The work is valuable and the rules devised by the author prove very useful. This article also proposes to provide to the linguist all information on the paradigmatic phonemics and some practical rules for an exact phonological transcription of the language.

Alain Christian Bassène, after his Master (2001) and DEA (2003) dissertations devoted respectively to the phonology of Djola Eegimaa and the nominals in this same variety, has supported on October 13^th, 2006 at the University Lumière Lyon 2 in France, his doctoral dissertation on the following topic: «Description du Djola Banjal (Senegal)».

In this work, Bassène presents a general and as complete description as possible of the Eegimaa grammar. This description made it possible to review the study of phonology, morphophonology, morphology and syntax, in a typological and functional point of view.

Mamadou Bassène (2003), as to him, worked in the framework of his master dissertation on the following topic: «Some aspect of Djola Eegimaa phonology». He devoted his entire work to the vowel system. In so doing, he described the organization of Eegimaa vowel segments as well as their features. He also described the following phonological processes: vowel harmony, vowel elision, vowel coalescence, vowel lengthening, vowel juxtaposition and vowel insertion which are very common in Eegimaa.

Both works mentioned here above are of a high linguistic importance and the conclusions carried out will be very helpful to us mainly in the presentation of the Eegimaa language because nothing was apparently neglected.

To emphasize on the studies that stick much more than every other one, we have found the master dissertation of Ms. Adja Khady Thioune (2006) entitled «The influence of Wolof on African French and African English: a comparative study». In her work she studied the influence of Wolof on both popular French and English as spoken in the streets by ordinary people.

Following her example, we will devote our work on the study of the nature of the influence of a national language on French in Senegal. But the sole difference between our two studies will be that we will exclusively work on educated people.

Another study that is closely linked to our topic is the article of Mr. Edmund Biloa entitled «L'influence du Francais sur l'Anglais Camerounais». In this paper, he studied the contact between the two Cameroonian official languages namely French and English. He discovered a high frenchisation of the English language and pointed out that this phenomenon is due to the situation of a minority English-speaking community in a country where the vast majority of its citizens are French-speaking.

His paper, as pointed out previously, treats the contact of two official languages and the influence arising from that but ours will be somehow different talking about official and a vernacular language.

CHAPTER THREE

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The Fieldwork

1- The field of investigation

Ziguinchor, capital of Basse Casamance, is located in an area of economical, political, cultural and linguistic contacts. Estimated to about 10,125 people all around Senegal in 2002¹⁵, the Eegimaa people live in the Casamance region in an area known as Mof çvi. The area is bounded by the Casamance River on the north, the Kamobeul BTMlon on the west, the Ziguinchor-Oussouye road on the south, and the Brin-Nyassia road on the East. The area is composed of a set of ten villages whic h are: Essil, Badiatte, Kamobeul, Séléki , Enampor, Batighére Essil, Batighére BTMlon, Elubalir, Etama and Banjal¹⁶.

As for the two remaining places of the research zone: Dakar and Saint-Louis, they are both towns where a great number of Eegimaa people are found. Dakar being the capital city of Senegal is also the favourite destination of the Djola who drifted away from Mof çvi in search for better living conditions or for studies. The Djola people found in the town of Saint-Louis are, most of the time, student at the university.

2- Research population

On the two banks of river Casamance, in the south of Senegal, between Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, live populations labeled under the term of Djola. Approximately 550 000 (all dialects) in the 1990s¹⁷, Djola people constitute 5% of the Senegalese population.

The political organization of Djola people comprises a nobiliary chieftaincy which has nothing more than religious functions, advisory committees composed of old wise men who regulate the local litigations and heads of village s or cantons chosen by the administration and who have the special responsibility of collecting the tax. But the real power is held by adepts of animistic practices. But a part of the population adheres however to Islam or Christianity.

¹⁵ http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=SN

¹⁶ See Map 2: The Eegimaa speaking area, page5

1 7 E n cycl o p3/4d i a Universalis 1995 France S.A. All rights of intellectual and industrial ownership reserved.

3- The Sample

In the choice of our informants we tried to find a certain number of people capable of reflecting the general tendency (25 from Ziguinchor and 25 others from Dakar and Saint-Louis)¹⁸. All the informants fulfilled a certain number of criteria: they were Eegimaa native speakers, men and women aged of at least fifteen years and having attended school for at least seven years.

4- Tools of investigation

Concerning our tools of investigation, we used different methods and among these, we can mention: the questionnaire and the conversation recordings.

a- The questionnaire

The choice of our informants was done via a questionn aire. The paper in question comprises two major parts namely the identification and the questions. In the first one, people were asked to give personal information such as their family name, surname(s), address, age, sex and their birth country. As for the second part, people were asked a limited set of questions among which: their mother tongue, other spoken languages, if they have studied French and up to what level etc ¹⁹ . Once all those information collected, we picked up people likely to help.

b- The conversation recordings

For this research work, the topic chosen for our discussion was «education in the Eegimaa society ». By this topic, we mean t to talk about the specificities of education in the Eegimaa environment.

To foster discussion, we sometimes ask our informants to choose one ceremony or one aspect of their culture and tell us something about it. The main aim in doing so was not to test their knowledge concerning their culture but to make them fill free to speak so as we could record data for analysis. The conversation recordings lasted between five and seven minutes free discussions per informant.

18 See Appendix 3: The list of the informants, page 45. 1 9 See appendix 2: Questionnaire page 44.

CHAPTER FOUR

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Data anal_ysis

And

Interpretation