Donaldson, Coleman

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  • Publication
    Jula Ajami in Burkina Faso: A Grassroots Literacy in the Former Kong Empire
    (2013-10-01) Donaldson, Coleman
    Ajami (عجمي) is a term frequently used to refer to the use of the Arabic script to write sub-Saharan African languages. West African lingua francas such as Hausa, Wolof, and Fulani have a rather well-documented record of Ajami artifacts and use. In Eastern Manding varieties such as Bamanan and Jula, however, Ajami practices and texts have been viewed as rather limited in comparison. Recent 2012 fieldwork in Burkina Faso however suggests that Ajami practices in Jula have simply escaped the notice of the Western scholarly community. Drawing on ethnographic fieldnotes about production of Esoteric Islamic medicinal treatment recipes in addition to dialogues, descriptions and songs produced at my request, I explore Jula Ajami as a grassroots literacy existing alongside the Koranic schooling tradition. Turning to the texts themselves, I analyze the graphic system in use as well as the linguistic characteristics that suggest the enregisterment of Kong Jula as appropriate in Jula Ajami texts.
  • Publication
    Manding Reflexive Verb Constructions and Registers in Jula of Burkina Faso
    (2016-01-01) Donaldson, Coleman
    This article explores one structural way in which Jula differs from other Manding varieties: the forgoing of formally reflexive constructions in favor of formally ambiguous intransitive constructions and more rarely innovative idiomatic transitive constructions. To do so, I draw on contextually elicited forms from 2012 fieldwork with 9 Jula speakers in Burkina Faso. Given the limitations of elicitation, I explore wider acceptability judgments and text artifacts to reveal that Jula speakers in Burkina frequently recognize and in fact use formally reflexive constructions typically attributed to other Manding varieties such as Bamanan. These findings suggest that these so-called Bamanan constructions are enregistered (Agha 2007) for a certain social domain as sociolinguistic high-forms. This study thereby reveals the limitations of a traditional dialectology approach to understanding how various Manding forms circulate across isomorphic boundaries.
  • Publication
    Clear Language: Script, Register And The N’ko Movement Of Manding-Speaking West Africa
    (2017-01-01) Donaldson, Coleman Dupont
    What role should indigenous languages and literacy play in education and society in West Africa in the 21st century? My dissertation investigates this question in the context of the N’ko (ߒߞߏ) movement, which labors to promote an eponymous script invented for writing Manding in 1949 by the intellectual and author Sulemaana Kantè. Based primarily on three summers (2012, 2013, 2016) of fieldwork carried out between Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso, this ethnographic study sheds light on why N’ko-based literacy and education continue to spread across Manding-speaking West Africa by focusing on how the metalinguistic practices—that is, “talk about talk”—of N’ko’s students, intellectuals and interlocutors are connected to larger sociopolitical projects. Specifically, I analyze fieldnotes, artifacts (such as pictures, N’ko texts, online postings etc.), and audio recordings of both public interactions and semi-formal interviews that I collected between 2011 and 2016. In part to establish the relevant context, the dissertation begins with an investigation of Sulemaana Kantè and, drawing on his own words, analyzes him as a particular iteration of the Afro-Muslim vernacular tradition that gave rise to local language literacy in Arabic script or what is often called Ajami (Arabic ʿajamī) today. Subsequently, I demonstrate how alternative glosses of the word N’ko as either ‘Kantè’s script’ or ‘the Manding language’ are indexical of the heterogenous voices and ideas within and about the N’ko movement. Specifically, in Chapter Five, I explore how acts where N’ko references a script point to both a politically palatable and authentically embraced notion of pan-Africanism that is particularly salient for a younger generation of Western-educated N’ko activists. Alternatively, in Chapter Six, I investigate how the emergence and use of N’ko today as a label equivalent to Manding is rooted in not just ethno-nationalism, but also a desire to discursively cultivate savvy, hard-working and logical citizens as a basis to remake post-colonial West African society. This dissertation thereby shows the importance of metalinguistic discourse in accomplishing social action and sheds light on why state-directed efforts at promoting mother-tongue education in the region have failed.
  • Publication
    The Social Life of Orthography Development
    (2015-10-01) Donaldson, Coleman
    From a linguistic perspective the development of orthography for a language is often taken as a scientific endeavor involving the adoption of a set of graphic conventions for mapping the phonemic system of a language. In this paper I unpack how orthography development and use is necessarily wrapped up in socio-political debates. Approaching orthography graphically, I demonstrate how spelling itself frequently carries implicit metacommentary connected to these debates. Next, looking at orthography’s link with speech I argue that ideologies of language in departmentalized linguistics ignore and obscure the way orthography interacts with register phenomena within a language.
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    Orthography, Standardization, and Register: The Case of Manding
    (2017-01-01) Donaldson, Coleman
    Since at least the rise of nineteenth-century European nationalism, Westerners have in large part judged languages by whether they are written and standardized (Anderson 2006; Bauman and Briggs 2000; Blommaert 2006; Flores 2014). As the colonial era came to an end across much of the world in the 1960s, this tendency intermingled with the rising interest in development: what would be the place of the long minoritized indigenous languages of Africa, Asia and Latin America in the educational and political projects of postcolonial states? In Africa in particular, this led to a flourish-ing of orthographies for a large number of languages which had previously been excluded from domains of government and schooling. The initiatives of the post-independence period, however, did not lead to one single orthography, script or standard for many of these languages. This chapter examines one such case, the West African trade language of Manding, which is written in at least three distinct scripts today: Arabic, N’ko (ߏߞߒ) and Latin. Emerging respectively from before, during and after colonial rule, these three writing systems are variably embraced and wielded by distinct West African actors today.