Language contact in two border communities in Burkina Faso and Ghana. Lexical borrowings from French, English and African languages
type: CreativeWork
description: In this study, I investigate motivations for, and patterns of, lexical borrowing among Dagara-French and Dagara-English bilingual speakers as a function of age, sex, mobility, and degree of education in a multilingual border community where English and French are official state languages and Dagara is the shared local language. Dagara is a language spoken by about 1,400,000 people in the Northwestern corner of Ghana, the Southwestern part of Burkina Faso and the Northeastern part of Côte d’Ivoire. This partitioning is a well-known consequence of European colonization that created, in the early 19th century, an artificial political boundary and an ensuing official linguistic separation between two Dagara-speaking communities: the Anglophone Dagara on the northwest banks of the Volta River in Ghana and the Francophone Dagara on the southwest banks of the Volta River in Burkina Faso. This linguistic separation led to different language contact situations on each side of the political border. As in most African countries where the colonial language remains the official language of the nation, borrowings from multiple local and supra-local languages are a common phenomenon. Using fieldwork recordings from the two Ghana-Burkina border communities from a total of 100 participants analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, I show that the Dagara of Burkina Faso borrow predominantly from their official French language and, to a lesser extent, from English. The influence of French on the Dagara of Ghana is, on the other hand, minimal, as Dagara speakers in Ghana tend to borrow only from one ex-colonial language: their own official language, English. In addition to their respective official languages, speakers in both border communities borrow from local African languages that possess the greatest instrumental value by providing access to local economic ressources. The majority of borrowings attested in the corpus undergoes phonological and morphological a…
abstract: In this study, I investigate motivations for, and patterns of, lexical borrowing among Dagara-French and Dagara-English bilingual speakers as a function of age, sex, mobility, and degree of education in a multilingual border community where English and French are official state languages and Dagara is the shared local language. Dagara is a language spoken by about 1,400,000 people in the Northwestern corner of Ghana, the Southwestern part of Burkina Faso and the Northeastern part of Côte d’Ivoire. This partitioning is a well-known consequence of European colonization that created, in the early 19th century, an artificial political boundary and an ensuing official linguistic separation between two Dagara-speaking communities: the Anglophone Dagara on the northwest banks of the Volta River in Ghana and the Francophone Dagara on the southwest banks of the Volta River in Burkina Faso. This linguistic separation led to different language contact situations on each side of the political border. As in most African countries where the colonial language remains the official language of the nation, borrowings from multiple local and supra-local languages are a common phenomenon. Using fieldwork recordings from the two Ghana-Burkina border communities from a total of 100 participants analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, I show that the Dagara of Burkina Faso borrow predominantly from their official French language and, to a lesser extent, from English. The influence of French on the Dagara of Ghana is, on the other hand, minimal, as Dagara speakers in Ghana tend to borrow only from one ex-colonial language: their own official language, English. In addition to their respective official languages, speakers in both border communities borrow from local African languages that possess the greatest instrumental value by providing access to local economic ressources. The majority of borrowings attested in the corpus undergoes phonological and morphological a…
author: Beyogle, Richard
language: fr
keywords: Ghana-Hamile, Burkina Faso-Ouessa
date published: 2015-07-22T22:17:36Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:26:11Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/78487