What Happens to Class When a Language Dies? Language Change vs. Language Death

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.) 1. Introduction This paper presents the first documentation of the noun class system of the dying language Mani (buy), "Bullom So" in Ethnologue, a.k.a. Mmani, Mandenyi, etc.) spoken in Guinea and Sierra Leone. Mani has some few hundred speakers, all of whom speak either Soso (sus) or Temne (tem) as their everyday language. The Mani are concentrated in a restricted coastal area straddling the border between Guinea and Sierra Leone near the town of Morebaya, Kambia District, in Sierra Leone. A few other speakers are scattered in the littoral region from Conakry to Freetown (see Map 1 below). In the speech of what should probably be considered only "semi-speakers" (Dorian 1977; see the discussion around Table 2 below), the noun class system seems in total disarray, showing extreme variation across speakers and even within speakers. Throughout this discussion I make no real distinction between "rusty" speakers or semi-speakers (see Winford 2003 for some discussion of the terminology) and speakers of a dying language, for I believe they are one and the same, a question of telling the dancer from the dance. The processes at work on their language, however, can be differentiated. Some processes can be seen as normal or expected, given what is happening to other languages in its sub-group and more generally in Atlantic. These are the normal processes of language change. The representative comparator language for identifying these general processes of language change here is Kisi (kss and kqs; Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone), a well-documented, closely related language; I will also make reference to several languages more closely related to Mani but poorly documented and also dying. The second set of processes, however, are not of the same nature and represent what happens to a relatively complex or opaque morphological system when a language dies. Very often the two processes (language change and language death) are difficult to tease apart, but on the basis of a comparison with Kisi, an analysis of the Mani noun class system reveals ways of distinguishing the two. This analysis is, of course, facilitated by the moribund state of the language, i.e., the changes are extreme and evident even to the casual observer. The languages to be discussed are characterized in the next sections, first as to their genetic relationship, secondly as to their different states of morbidity. I then characterize the noun class system of Mani and in the following section identify and analyze the "mistakes" made by Mani speakers. The paper concludes with some discussion of the significance of those mistakes. 1.1 Language classification. The South Atlantic languages, a branch of Niger- Congo, are shown below in Figure 1, following (Blench 2006). Figure 1 South Atlantic (Niger-Congo) South Atlantic A. Mel languages 1. Temne; Baga Maduri, Baga Sitemu, Baga Koba, Landoma, etc. 2. Bulom languages: Kisi; Mani, Sherbro, Kim, Bom 3. Gola B. Limba Although other South Atlantic languages will be mentioned, the two languages of focus are the fairly closely related languages, Kisi and Mani (in bold),2 as characterized, respectively, in Childs 1995 and Childs To appear. 1.2 Endangerment. The Bullom languages are generally imperiled. Of the five languages in the group, Bom has a few hundred speakers but Kim has fewer than twenty. Mani has some few hundred as well (MDP 2004-06), and Sherbro less than 20,000 (Chris Corcoran 2010 p.c.).3 Despite these comparatively higher numbers, Sherbro has also shown sure signs of endangerment with speakers shifting to Mende (Hanson 1979), as is the case also with Kim and Bom. Kisi may be the only viable Bullom language with nearly 500,000 speakers (Childs 1995) in a geographically coherent area (cf. Childs 2002). Thus, the macro sociolinguistic conditions of Mani and Kisi, as seen in the geography and demography, contrast sharply: Mani totters on the edge of death while Kisi remains quite viable and vital (for a while). …