We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Seenku.
- Authors
McPherson, Laura
- Abstract
Seenku (ISO 639-3: sos) is a Western Mande language of the Samogo group, whose other members include languages like Dzùùngoo (Solomiac 2014), Jowulu (Djilla, Eenkhoorn & Eenkhoorn-Pilon 2004), and Duungooma (Hochstetler 1996), spoken on either side of the Mali-Burkina Faso border. The endonymic language name Seenku [sɛ̃́ː-kû] (also spelled on Ethnologue as Seeku) literally means 'thing of the Sɛ̃ː ethnicity', but it is widely known to outsiders as Sembla (variant spelling Sambla), which doubles as an exonym for the ethnicity. Seenku has two primary dialects, Northern and Southern, spoken in villages approximately 40 km west of Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso (see map in Figure 1). This study focuses on the more populous southern dialect, particularly the variety spoken in and around the large village center of Bouendé (local name [ɡ͡béné-ɡũ̏]), with a population of approximately 12,000 speakers; the Northern dialect, spoken around the village center of Karangasso (local name [təmî]), has a population of approximately 5000 speakers and was the subject of a sketch grammar (Prost 1971). The southern dialect had until recently received little scholarly attention, with the exception of a Master's thesis on the morphophonology at the Université de Ouagadougou (Congo 2013), but is now the subject of the NSF Documenting Endangered Languages grant supporting this research (BCS-1664335). Other published work includes McPherson (2017a, b, c, d).
- Subjects
BURKINA Faso; NOUN phrases (Grammar); RESEARCH grants; DIALECTS; MORPHOPHONEMICS; ORTHOGRAPHY &; spelling
- Publication
Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 2020, Vol 50, Issue 2, p220
- ISSN
0025-1003
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1017/S0025100318000312