Pots, plants and people: an interdisciplinary documentation of Baïnouk knowledge systems. Linguistic component

Baïnouk is the cover term for a cluster of related languages of the Atlantic branch of the Niger-Congo language phylum. The languages are located in the Casamance area of Senegal. With ca. 6,000 speakers, they are endangered languages for which no comprehensive linguistic description and no documentation at all is available. The project focuses on three varieties – Gunyaamolo, Gubaher, and Gujaher – which are not or only partly mutually intelligible have received little or no linguistic attention till to date. According to historical research, the Baïnouk and related, almost extinct, Kasanga are to be regarded as the autochthones of Casamance. The influx of populations speaking Joola languages and Mandinka resulted in the linguistic assimilation of the majority of Baïnouk speakers, and today, Baïnouk is only spoken in isolated pockets by small communities which are not in contact with each other in rural settings. Baïnouk cultural traits are similarly influenced by the long cohabitation with other groups; and many striking cultural practices like wet rice cultivation, sacred groves, mask dances, elaborate initiation rites, and pottery, to name but a few, are attested throughout Casamance
and claimed by several ethnolinguistic groups as originating with them. Ethnographic and archaeological studies, however, have concentrated on the major groups, notably the Joola, to date.

The few remaining Baïnouk communities are affected by a long-term low-level conflict and climate change, resulting in a reduction in the number of speakers living in villages
and in a rapid shift in agricultural and cultural practices. Therefore, a documentation of the Baïnouk languages in their cultural context will not be possible much longer.
The project will create a varied and representative corpus of the three different Baïnouk varieties. A wide range of communicative events will be recorded, glossed and annotated. In addition, the project will collect data on past and present pottery practices through a combination of archaeological and ethnographic methods. Pottery is an important facet of Baïnouk material culture, and in itself endangered. The ethnobotanical documentation will create a record of plants attested in the area together with their taxonomy and use, before biological diversity and its knowledge will become crucially reduced,as shown to happen in other parts of the country. Pottery and plant specimens will be collected, catalogued and archived. The linguistic data from the two domains (cf. interviews, procedural texts, taxonomies) will enter the documentary corpus. In addition, a multimedia database of the nominal lexicon will be created and visualise the conceptual spaces of the lexica for pottery- and plant-related items.
The investigation of this area of grammatical structure will constitute the third focus of the project. Recent research on a Joola language has pointed to the noun class systems of Atlantic languages as more based on semantic criteria than better known Bantu noun class systems. In particular, Joola noun class assignment is often motivated by criteria relating to use of an object in cultural and agricultural practices. A study of the Baïnouk noun class system is therefore considered of prime relevance for Atlantic and general linguistics. In addition, this research will directly benefit the pottery and plant studies, as it will allow a deeper linguistic analysis of the nominal vocabulary in these domains. In particular, an analysis of the NCs in which plant and pottery terms occur will enhance the understanding of their folk classification, as it is expected to be linked to nominal classification. At the same time, the ethnographic information collected on pottery and plant knowledge will allow much deeper insight into possible cultural
motivations for noun class membership of nouns from these domains than linguistic research on its own could offer. This talk will focus on the linguistic component of the project and present preliminary findings to illustrate its importance for an understanding of how linguistic categorization in Baïnouk languages is shaped by cultural practices.