Baïnounk Gubëeher

Cobbinah, Alexander

Abstract

This chapter, an expanded and updated version of the grammatical sketch first presented in Cobbinah (2013a), gives an overview of basic phonological, morphological, and syntactic phenomena in Baïnounk Gubëeher, a language spoken by ca. 1,000 people that belongs to the Baïnounk cluster, which in turn is attributed to the North Atlantic branch of Atlantic languages. The speakers of Gubëeher concentrate in the village of Djibonker, in the vicinity of Ziguinchor in the Casamance region of Senegal. The vast majority of speakers of Gubëeher are highly multilingual and live in multilingual social settings. The high impact of language contact on structural features of the language are addressed in this chapter as well. The data presented are based on fieldwork and transcriptions of recordings made on-site. Salient topics in Baïnounk Gubëeher include a complex prefixed noun class system with suffixed plurals, complex TAM morphology, morphological focus marking, complex verbal extensions, (ATR) vowel harmony, and a vigesimal/quinary numeral system.

Citation

Cobbinah, A. (2024). Baïnounk Gubëeher. In F. Luepke (Ed.), The Oxford guide to the Atlantic languages of West Africa (263-290). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198736516.003.0012

• Publication Date: Nov 7, 2024
• Deposit Date: Oct 1, 2017
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Pages: 263-290
• Book Title: The Oxford guide to the Atlantic languages of West Africa
• ISBN: 9780198736516
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198736516.003.0012
• Keywords: Atlantic, Niger-Congo, Baïnounk, descriptive linguistics, field linguistics