LANGUAGE CONTACT: THE CASE OF MANDING AND JOLA-FONYI 1 1. Fogny-Jola of Kajamutay is the language of some tens of thousands of speakers in Basse-Casamance (Senegal) and belongs the the Jola linguistic group, which includes over a dozen different languages [Pozdniakov 1993: 20-21; Kennedy 1964]. In this region Mandinka serves as a lingua franca. This situation implies a massive infusion of Manding words into the vocabularies of the local languages. At the same time, Mandinka itself is developing in relative isolation fom the other languages of the Manding branch of the Mande family, such as Bamana and the Maninka of Guinea. The paucity of contacts with ‘core Manding languages’ has enabled the creation of a substratum of Fogny-Jola (and other local languages) in Mandinka, which has further contributed to its separation from the other languages of the eastern Manding to such a point that mutual intelligibility has become difficult. 2.1. My analysis is based upon David Sapir’s dictionary of Jola of Kajamutay (1989). This 197-page manuscript dictionary includes some 4,000 entries, of which a great number are derived words. The author identifies loan- words, but nevertheless one can find borrowings from Manding languages that are not marked, and further, many of the words which Sapir identifies as deriving from Mande languages are not attested there: ,la’q ‘door’, ,qnmj``r ‘roof-crest’, ,r``e ‘tax’, jtÕ` ‘to keep an animal’. Sapir occasionally marks as Manding borrowings words which instead have been borrowed by Mandinka from Jola (e.g., Jol: ,o`rh > Mdk o»rhÀ ‘to make a conventional gesture to someone, according to a code learned in initiation’), or from yet other languages, most often Wolof, which are foreign both to Jola and to Mandinka. 2.2. Examination of this corpus gave me 200 words shared by Kajamutay Jola with Manding languages. Of course it is quite possible that some of my connections will be wrong, and that I may have failed to identify some words of common origin; nevertheless, the figure of 200 words can serve us as a reference. 2.3. In theory, we can identify four paths to explain the appearance of words common to Jola and Mande languages: a. a loan Manding > Jola (including those cases where Manding serves as the intermediary between Jola and another language, most often Arabic); b. a loan Jola > Mandinka; c. an independent borrowing from a third language by Jola and Mandinka; d. a common origin (since Atlantic and Mande languages are related at the level of Proto-Niger-Congo). 2.4. Several criteria can be adduced to establish the origin of the word: a. if the word is attested in several Mande languages, including Mandinka, but absent from Atlantic languages other than Jola, then the lexeme is to be considered of Mande origin; b. if the lexeme is not attested in Mande languages other than Mandinka, and if, moreover, it appears in several Atlantic languages, the origin can be attributed to Jola; c. words of Arabic origin pass most often into Jola from Mandinka, since this language is the local vehicle for Muslim faith and culture. The phonetic image of the word can also serve as an indicator, albeit a secondary one, of the direction of the borrowing: if a base in Jola has a consonantal inflection, the word is almost certainly Jola and not Manding, since the basic structure of a word in Jola is CVC(CV): Jol: ,lddrddr 'd.r.a`( ‘chicken flea’ > Mdk l–rddrh; Jol: , jtshhq 'd.r.a`( ‘the biggest drum’ > Mdk: j‡shhqh; Jol: ,Õ`a ‘to massage (muscles)’ >Mdk: Õ…ah ‘to massage (in a figurative sense)’. However, this criterion is only valid in combination with the preceding ones, since old borrowings in Jola undergo the loss of the final vowel: e.g., PMdn )fa‘hqúô ‘hut of the initiates’ > Mnk a‡q—, Mnk-Kurussa fa–q—, Mnk-Manding a‘q—, Wsl a·qô ‘hut in which initiates remain until healed’, Mdk a‘hqdd ‘place consecrated to the circumcision of women’ > Jol ,a‘hq 'd( (same meaning as in Mandinka; it is a borrowing by Jola from Mandinka with loss of the final vowel); PMdn: )j»e¤ ‘to gather, to add, gathering" > Bmn, Mnk j»e¤ ‘to gather; a territorial unit grouping several villages’, Mdk j»et ‘crowd, association, age-group’ > Jol ,j`e 'd.r( ‘work-group, association of people’, etc. If the internal structure of the word involved is transparent in one of the languages, then obviously it derives from that language: Mdk e»À,¤n,e»À ‘everywhere’, from e»À ‘side, place, spot’; ¤n ‘a particle of distributive sense’ > Jol a`mnna`m ‘everywhere’; PMdn )c…,fvú ‘roan antilope Hippotragus equinus)’, from )c… ‘mouth’, )fvú 1 The first version of this paper was presented in 1994 for Dmitry Olderogge‘s Readings. It has been translated from Franch by Stephen Belcher, to whom I express my great gratitude. Unfortunately, I have had no possibility to check David Sapir‘s Jola-French-English Dictionary for the English equivalents of the Jola words, so that their translations given in the present paper may differ from those of D. Sapir.