A first appraisal of Bainouk and its main contact language Mandinka
| Language | Bainouk |
| Depositor | Friederike Lüpke |
| Affiliation | SOAS University of London |
| Location | Senegal |
| Collection ID | 0225 |
| Grant ID | PPG0030 |
| Funding Body | ELDP |
| Collection Status | Collection online |
| Landing Page Handle | http://hdl.handle.net/2196/9dd2ac5f-c4be-4311-9e92-4cc853352034 |
Summary of the collection
With about 6,000 speakers in the Upper Casamance region of Senegal and in neighbouring Gambia, Bainouk is a highly endangered Atlantic language. This collection consists of a sociolinguistic survey of Bainouk, and a first step towards its documentation, taking into account the main contact language Mandinka. Speakers of Bainouk have been bilingual in Mandinka for such a long time that bilingualism is an integral part of their identity. Following economic and linguistic pressure on the Bainouk, they are giving up their established bilingualism and shifting to Mandinka and other regionally and nationally dominant languages.
Group represented
Bainouk is spoken in a decreasing number of villages in the Casamance region of Senegal in an area of great linguistic and cultural convergence, characterised by longstanding and persisting multilingualism, and going hand in hand with vague, multiple and easily changeable ethnic affiliations. The historical causes for these far-reaching convergences lie in the succession of empires emerging in the area from 300 BCE on and culminating in the Mali empire around 1250-1450 CE. The social, economic and religious impact of these empires on the societies in their realm was and is enormous: throughout the concerned regions, cross-cutting ethnic and linguistic borders, this depositing team found similar systems of social organisation, as evidenced by identical caste systems, secret societies, and landlord-stranger relationships. Major trade routes traverse the area, also serving the spread of Islam as the dominating religion.
Language information
Bainouk is also known as Baynunk and Banyun. Speakers of Bainouk have been bilingual in the Mande language Mandinka for such a long time that bilingualism has become an integral part of their identity. A massive settlement of strangers has, however, resulted in great economic and linguistic pressure on the Bainouk, who start giving up their established bilingualism in Bainouk and Mandinka and shift altogether to Mandinka, to the regional lingua franca Joola Fogny, and to the nationally dominant language Wolof.
Acknowledgement and citation
To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Lüpke, Friederike. 2017. A first appraisal of Bainouk and its main contact language Mandinka. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-000F-B653-8. Accessed on [insert date here].
