Volume 25, Issue 2

The paper discusses attitudes, identity construction, agents of linguistic change, and the outcome of dense language contact in Kenya's colonial army during the early decades of the twentieth century. The growth and development of a simplified Swahili variety in the Kenyan battalions of the King's African Rifles (KAR) during the inter-war period was influenced by the European officers' attitude towards Africans and their languages, the military's overarching desire to construct a distinct identity in the colony, and the diverse ethnolinguistic background of African soldiers. While the colonial military provided the ethnographic settings in which the new Swahili variety emerged, it was the African soldiers who were the principal agents in the restructuring and maintenance of KiKAR. The paper further illustrates the structural and lexical simplification of KiKAR based on data contained in KAR's language teaching manual: Newell's (1933) Notes on Ki-Swahili as Spoken by the K.A.R. KiKAR provides a rare glimpse into the outcome of an early contact situation involving diverse African languages and English during Swahili's pre-standardization era.

It is widely acknowledged that all languages have a class of adjectives that can be formally or functionally distinguished from other word classes. This article deals with the differences between nouns and adjectives in Dagbani, a Gur language spoken in Ghana. Remarkably, a three-way distinction is required in order to account for the different types. Specifically, Dagbani appears to have two classes whose members can take the functions typically assigned to adjectives. Their major role is to modify a noun, whereas nouns themselves cannot modify each other. The distinction between nouns and adjectives and between the two types of adjectives is based on morphological and syntactic factors: while Type A adjectives behave exactly like canonical nouns from a morphological point of view, Type B resemble loans in that they lack any kind of morphological complexity. However, on the syntactic level, Type B words are more similar to nouns than Type A are. This article investigates the relation between the three different word types and aims at an account of their classification.

Résumé Le bedja, seule langue de la branche nord du couchitique, présente, dans la syntaxe des énoncés complexes, un phénomène de grammaticalisation largement attesté dans d'autres langues du monde : le passage d'un verbe ‘dire’, en l'occurrence un dérivé verbo-nominal, à une marque de proposition subordonnée exprimant le but ou la finalité. Cependant, cette langue ne présentant aucune des étapes intermédiaires habituellement postulées dans la chaîne de grammaticalisation, même à l'état de traces, elle conduit à s'interroger sur le caractère supposé universel de ladite chaîne. L'étude interne des procédés syntaxiques divers et récurrents pour exprimer la notion de visée au moyen du verbe ‘dire’, couplée à l'analyse du fonctionnement syntaxique du morphème grammaticalisé vont dans le sens des récentes avancées de la typologie dans ce domaine syntactico-sémantique : il existe plusieurs scénarios évolutifs qui sont liés aux systèmes syntaxiques et sémantiques des langues. Le bedja illustre l'un d'entre eux, celui où c'est le sens d'une construction qui constitue l'élément déclencheur du processus. La chaîne de grammaticalisation est bien, pour cette langue, celle d'un passage direct d'un verbe de parole à une marque de finalité.