# Alexandra Vydrina

Alexandra Vydrina (2 July 1988 – 16 September 2021) was a Russian linguist and researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (Paris) specializing in research on African languages of Guinea.

## Life and contributions

Vydrina received her education at St. Petersburg State University and in 2008 started working on the Kakabe language of Guinea, a Mande language spoken in the Fouta Djallon highland region. She was a doctoral student at INALCO (Paris), and had postdoctoral positions in the CNRS and at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow).
She completed a dictionary of Kakabe in 2015, and a comprehensive grammatical description in 2017. She also contributed to general questions of the interaction of tone and intonation with information structure, of modality, and of small-scale multilingualism from the perspective of her research on the Kakabe language.

## Works
### Major works on Kakabe

* Vydrina, Alexandra (2015). "Dictionnaire kakabé-français suivi d'un indexe français-kakabé". Mandenkan. 53: 1–253.
* Vydrina, Alexandra (2017). "A corpus-based description of Kakabe, a Western Mande language: prosody in grammar" (Document). Paris: INALCO. Available in open access: https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01801759

### Further research articles

* Vydrin, Valentin; Vydrina, Alexandra (2010). "Impact of Pular on the Kakabe language (Futa Jallon, Guinea)". Journal of Language Contact - THEMA. 3: 86–105. doi:10.1163/19552629-90000006. S2CID 143813204.
* Vydrina, Alexandra (2011). "Лабильность в языке какабе". Acta Linguistica Petropolitana: MANDEICA PETROPOLITANA: 174–217.
* Vydrina, Alexandra (2011). "Показатель пассива в северо-западных диалектах языка какабе". Le monde mandé: Pour le cinquantième anniversaire de Valentin Vydrin.
* Vydrina, Alexandra (2013). "Le comportement tonal des marqueurs prédicatifs dans la langue kakabé". Mandenkan: Bulletin semestriel d'études ličnguistiques mandé (50): 147–170. doi:10.4000/mandenkan.283. ISSN 0752-5443.
* Vydrina, Alexandra; Vydrin, Valentin (2014). "Предварительные наброски к диалектологии какабе". От Бикина до Бамбалюмы, из варяг в греки: экспедиционные этюды в честь Елены Всеволодовны Перехвальской. Нестор-История. ISBN 978-5-4469-0242-2.
* Vydrina, Alexandra (2014). "Modes of modality: Modality, typology, and universal grammar". From agent-oriented modality to sequential: The polysemy of the marker ni in Kakabe (Mande). Amsterdam: Benjamins. pp. 379–406.
* Vydrina, Alexandra (2017). "Kakabe jazyk". Jazyki mira: Jazyki Mande. St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istorija. pp. 172–212.
* Segerer, Guillaume; Vydrina, Alexandra (2020). "Sogolon". Language in Africa. 1 (4): 55. doi:10.37892/2686-8946-2020-1-4-55-68. S2CID 241540126.
* Vydrina, Alexandra (2020). "Operator focus in discourse and grammar: The two perfectives in Kakabe". Journal of African Languages and Linguistics. 41 (1): 99–145. doi:10.1515/jall-2020-2005. ISSN 1613-3811. S2CID 222316820.
* Nikitina, Tatiana; Vydrina, Alexandra (2020). "Reported speech in Kakabe: Loose syntax with flexible indexicality" (PDF). Folia Linguistica. 54 (1): 133–166. doi:10.1515/flin-2020-2029. ISSN 1614-7308. S2CID 216554576.
* Vydrina, Alexandra (2020). "Topicality in sentence focus utterances". Studies in Language. 44 (3): 501–547. doi:10.1075/sl.18069.vyd. S2CID 225410192.
* Vydrina, Alexandra (2021). "Fouta-Djallon linguistic ecology: Between polyglossia and small-scale multilingualism". International Journal of Bilingualism. 25 (4): 959–978. doi:10.1177/13670069211023148. ISSN 1367-0069. S2CID 237829968.

## Secondary sources

* Guillemain, Franck. 2019. Sasha Vydrina, la langue kakabé en Guinée. Documentary film. 17 minutes. https://www.canal-u.tv/video/cnrs_ups2259/sasha_vydrina_la_langue_kakabe_en_guinee.50573
* Konoshenko, Maria. 2021. In memoriam: Alexandra Vydrina (1988-2021). Language in Africa 2(3). 3–10. (doi:10.37892/2686-8946-2021-2-3-3-10)