1 The Grammar of Knowledge in Maaka (Western Chadic, Nigeria) Anne Storch & Jules Jacques Coly Knowledges or knowledge traditions should be imagined in the plural […]. Knowledges may be divided into explicit and implicit (or tacit), pure and applied, local and universal. Although histories of skills are rarely written, ‘Knowing how’ clearly deserves a place alongside ‘knowing that’. In similar fashion, dominated or subjugated knowledges (saviors asujettis) deserve a place alongside rather than underneath dominant ones. There is a political aspect to the question, ‘what is knowledge?’ Who has the authority to decide what is knowledge? – Burke (2012: 5) 1 Introduction In Maaka, a language of north-eastern Nigeria, the notions of knowledge and truth can be expressed in various ways, depending on the context. Indeed, the very concept of knowledge is rather complex in Maaka, and requires that we appropriately define and describe several principles first of all. For example, KNOW could be framed as volitional and agentive, and may have semantic extensions into the domain of control and possession. Other possibilities include the conceptualization of KNOW as being correlated to a perceptual process, which needs to be further specified in terms of how and under which circumstances knowledge was achieved and information gathered. This specification is articulated by means of evidential markers and epistemic and modal verbs, which help to estimate the reliability of the reported event, of the informant, or of one’s own cognitive potential in terms of grasping inherent contextual information. There are various types of evidential and epistemic markers in Maaka, which either relate to a speaker’s knowledge and general attitude towards the truth of a proposition and