Dr Friederike Lüpke awarded

Friederike Lüpke and her co-applicants, the ethnoarchaeologist Moustapha Sall and the ethnobotanist Mathieu Guèye, both from the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar (Senegal) were awarded €246,500 from the German VW foundation. The funding from the foundation's DoBeS programme aimed at the documentation of endangered languages is for the project "Pots, plants and people: a documentation of Bainouk knowledge systems". This interdisciplinary project will investigate the links between plant and pottery knowledge and use and linguistic categorization in three varieties of the Atlantic language Baïnouk spoken in Southern Senegal, and at the same time document cultural practices and the language use linked to them in this endangered language. SOAS PhD student Alexander Cobbinah will also participate in the project.

The project will document the endangered Baïnouk languages of Southern Senegal (West Africa), with a focus on particularly endangered knowledge systems in the domains of pottery, plant knowledge and use and nominal classification.

Baïnouk is the cover term for a cluster of related languages of the Atlantic branch of the Niger‐Congo language phylum. The languages are located in the Casamance area of Senegal. With ca. 6,000 speakers, they are endangered languages for which no comprehensive linguistic description and no documentation at all is available. The project focuses on three varieties – Gunyaamolo, Gubaher, and Gujaher – which are not or only partly mutually intelligible. Gunyaamolo has received some linguistic attention to date, with publications on some aspects of its grammar. For Gujaher, a very brief grammatical sketch exists. However, no comprehensive description is available, and apart from a pilot project on Gunyaamolo conducted by the principal applicant, no documentation of a Baïnouk variety has been undertaken. According to historical research, the Baïnouk and related, almost extinct, Kasanga are to be regarded as the autochthones of Casamance. The influx of populations speaking Joola languages and Mandinka resulted in the linguistic assimilation of the majority of Baïnouk speakers, and today, Baïnouk is only spoken in isolated pockets by small communities which are not in contact with each other in rural settings. Baïnouk cultural traits are similarly influenced by the long cohabitation with other groups; and many striking cultural practices like wet rice cultivation, sacred groves, mask dances, elaborate initiation rites, and pottery, to name but a few, are attested throughout Casamance and claimed by several ethnolinguistic groups as originating with them. Ethnographic and archaeological studies, however, have concentrated on the major groups, notably the Joola, to date. The few remaining Baïnouk communities are affected by a long‐term low‐level conflict and climate change, resulting in a reduction in the number of speakers living in villages and in a rapid shift in agricultural and cultural practices. Therefore, a documentation of the Baïnouk languages in their cultural context will not be possible much longer.

The project will create a varied and representative corpus of the three different Baïnouk varieties. A wide range of communicative events from male and female speakers of different ages and educational and social backgrounds will be recorded. Already collected corpus data on Gunyaamolo will be integrated into the corpus and complemented with new data from a variety of genres and registers. As far as possible, the composition of the subcorpora of the three Baïnouk varieties will be similar so that maximal comparability is achieved. All corpus data will be transcribed and receive a free translation. A substantial amount of texts will be glossed with parts of speech and morpheme‐by‐morpheme annotations.
In addition, the project will collect data on past and present pottery practices through a combination of archaeological and ethnographic methods. Pottery is an important facet of Baïnouk material culture, and in itself endangered. In one Baïnouk village, pottery is not practiced anymore, and this trend is likely to be mirrored in the other Baïnouk areas, as plastic containers imported from China are replacing locally made vessels. Therefore, a documentation of present‐day pottery practice will offer timely data on a disappearing and globally endangered craft. The information on past pottery production through the archaeological investigation of discarded remains in shell and household middens will offer evi- dence as to the migrations and identities of populations producing them in the past. Recent studies of pottery among the Joola by co‐applicant Moustapha Sall show the existence of two different techniques, the distribution of one of which coincides with former Baïnouk territory. The combined results of the ethnographic study and of excavations in present‐day Baïnouk territory promise to shed light on the origins of the different techniques and draw conclusions on the development of pottery in the area.

The second focus of the project consists of documentation of plant terminology and use. In the entire Casamance, the knowledge of plants is decreasing, and climate change and rural exodus are exacerbating the loss of this important area of traditional ecological knowledge. The ethnobotanical documentation will create a record of plants attested in the area together with their taxonomy and use, before biological diversity and its knowledge will become crucially reduced, as shown to happen in other parts of the country by co‐applicant Mathieu Guèye. It is already evident that long‐lasting droughts from the 1960ies onward have strong adverse effects on the sophisticated techniques of wet rice cultivation for which Casamance is renowned. It is very likely that other plants are suffering from the reduced rainfalls, and traditional knowledge and use of plants is vanishing consequently.

Pottery and plant specimens will be collected, catalogued and archived. The linguistic data from the two domains (cf. interviews, procedural texts, taxonomies) will enter the documentary corpus. In addition, a LEXUS/VICOS database of the nominal lexicon will be created and visualise the conceptual spaces of the lexica for pottery‐ and plant‐related items. The linguistic documentation of pottery and plant vocabulary offers a direct link to the rich noun class (NC) system of the Baïnouk languages. The investigation of this area of grammatical structure will constitute the third focus of the project. Recent research on a Joola language has pointed to the NC systems of Atlantic languages as more based on semantic criteria than better known Bantu NC systems. In particular, Joola NC assignment is often motivated by criteria relating to use of an object in cultural and agricultural practices. A study of the Baïnouk NC system is therefore considered of prime relevance for Atlantic and general linguistics. In addition, this research will directly benefit the pottery and plant studies, as it will allow a deeper linguistic analysis of the nominal vocabulary in these domains. In particular, an analysis of the NCs in which plant and pottery terms occur will enhance the understanding of their folk classification, as it is expected to be linked to nominal classification. At the same time, the ethnographic information collected on pottery and plant knowledge will allow much deeper insight into possible cultural motivations for NC membership of nouns from these domains than linguistic research on its own could offer.

Members of the different Baïnouk speech communities founded the cultural association BOREPAB (Bureau d’Organisation, de Recherche et d’Etude du Patrimoine Baïnouk), representing the majority of Baïnouk speakers since 1980. BOREPAB keenly welcomes the linguistic description and documentation of all Baïnouk varieties and their culture as a prerequisite for any maintenance activities. The proposed project will be conducted under the guidance and with active participation of BOREPAB. In addition, the project will also be of central relevance to the speech communities of Baïnouk and its contact languages, since a faithful reflection of their linguistic repertoires will yield data representative of their complex linguistic and social identities. Through an exhibition of botanical and archaeological artefacts in the field base in Ziguinchor (Casamance), the results will be made directly available to the speech communities. The results of the project will make a timely contribution to the linguistic description and documentation of endangered and minority languages and constitute a repository of language data of great value to future generation of researchers from the disciplines of linguistics, botany, archaeology, history, social anthropology, and for community members alike.