Destino de los recursos del CSCR en los gobiernos locales

Early anthropologists, sociologists, ethnographers, historians, and linguists who worked on Dagara treated general topics on Dagara that include, but are not limited to, phonetics and phonology, syntax, the history and culture of Dagara. However, little attention has been given to the study of language contact phenomena, lexical borrowings in particular, and especially to border communities in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the border communities share the same native language, but also speak different ex-colonial official languages.

This phenomenon is common in Africa merely because France, Britain, Spain and Portugal partitioned Africa paying no attention to the complex linguistic situation of the continent. As artificial boundaries were drawn between homogenous communities, while implanting the colonizers’ languages in the colonies, it created further variations and multiple contact situations. It is in this dimension that Dagara has, for many years, been in contact with several other sub-Saharan African languages and particularly with ex-colonial European languages such as French and English. However, no empirical study, to the best of my

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knowledge, has documented the language contact phenomena of the Dagara-speaking communities both in Ghana and Burkina Faso. Poplack et al. (1988), Thomason (2001), Winford (2003), and Shijulal et al. (2010) have all postulated theories referring to loanwords adoption into another language. These include factors, inter alia, connected to “intensity of contact” between the speakers of the respective languages in the community, through imposition of the colonial languages on the colonies, and to social motivations for borrowing. Other theories also relevant to explaining the emergence and diffusion of loanwords adoptions are Milroy’s (1980) and Evans (2004) diffusion theories. These theories postulate that there is a correlation between people’s geographical mobility and the amount and type of borrowings that they use. All these models will serve as the basis of this dissertation to investigate Dagara-French and Dagara- English contact phenomena in an attempt to contribute to these theories and also inform other researchers of Dagara social motivations for borrowing from French, English, and other sub- Saharan languages.

As this study focuses on the current sociolinguistic situations of the early 21st century bilingual Dagara-French and Dagaara-English speaking communities, the research is guided by the following research questions:

1) What are the types of borrowings found in Dagara among Dagara-French and Dagara- English bilingual speakers?

2) What are the sociolinguistic motivations for borrowing from English and French? 3) What social groups of the speech community are involved in the phenomenon of

borrowing?

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French, English and other sub-Saharan languages inform us about the status, power, and prestige of these same languages? Do these attitudes correlation with the degree of borrowing?

5) Will level of education, age, gender, and ocupation affect (or correlate with) the amount and type of loans from English, French and the other major Ghanaian/Burkina languages?

While I try to find answers to these questions, I also hope that this work will attempt to provide a tangible contribution to previous theoretical and methodological assumptions and approaches to the various functions of borrowing.

3.5 Hypotheses

First, I predict that everyone will borrow from his/her own ex-colonial official language because, from a theoretical perspective, lexical borrowing is paramount in communities where an ex-colonial European language is used as official language, the language of instruction, and of all governmental transactions.

Second, I predict that borrowing will vary with age, level of education, and gender. Apart from that, it is also predicted that borrowings will vary with different registers. For example, younger people, highly educated speakers, and women will borrow more. Given that the youth are more motivated to explore the outside world as an influence of globalization than the older generation and that Dagara culture used to affect female education, and now that female education awareness is on ascendancy today, the latter group of speakers might be more exposed or motivated to use the official languages than the former. Religious registers will show the most English, French, and Twi borrowings than the other registers, considering the role that religion has in the region.

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Third, I hypothesize ’symmetrical diffusion’. I predict that both sides will also use borrowings from other languages (than English and French), because there have been other language contact situations among the Dagara people, with Twi, Dioula, Moré, and Sissala, before and after the colonial period.

Fourth, geographical mobility and/or social network integration will play a role in the amount and types of borrowings used in general due to the fact that this study focuses on a border community where border and population movement is never restricted. Milroy’s (1980) and Evans’s (2004) diffusion theories assert that geographical mobility and social network integration correlate with the amount and type of borrowings that speakers use, and that “personal network structure in linguistic communities predicts relative closeness to local norms or loanwords usage” (p.154). The ease of movement across the Ghana-Burkina border is facilitated by the ECOWAS protocol on free movement of persons, goods and services (see Chapter 1).

Finally, I predict that loanwords from French, English and the other Sub-Saharan African languages will take the form of pure loans (with phonological and morpho-phonological adaptations); loan blends (derivational or compound blends); loan shifts: semantic loans and loan translations (calques); and pure native and hybrid creations (native words to express foreignness).

3.6 Summary

As has been noted in Bodomo (1997), the majority of African languages have noun class systems, just as we have seen for the case of Dagara. A careful analysis of such noun class systems in Dagara will provide learners and researchers insight into the adaptation of loanwords

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into the recipient languages’ morphology. Following Thomason (2001) and Winford (2003), who argue that in language contact situation foreign morphemes are often imported and some are substituted with native ones, I have shown how given the noun class system of Dagara in which plural formation takes the form of suffixation, Dagara-French and Dagara-English bilingual speakers might create hybrids (expressions with morphological adaptation) with loanwords from the donor languages. We have also seen from Nakuma’s analysis of Dagara word division that it is possible to combine, for example, two separate nouns, a noun and an adjective, or a noun and a verb, into single units of words. Knowledge of these structures of the language offers a good ground to analyzing the types of borrowings in Dagara bilingual discourse.

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CHAPTER FOUR