Last March, one of our teams took off to Senegal with the project of filming the languages of two communities: Menik, in the east, and Baynunk, in Casamance. Two young linguists, Adjeratou Sall and Sokhna Bao-Diop were there too. This Friday May 28, Sorosoro Director Rozenn Milin and production manager Sabrina Pourchasse have gathered in Paris with all the participants of the Sénélangues project to assess the progress of our first collaborations. An opportunity for us to return on this ambitious project.

The Sénélangues project, directed by Stéphane Robert, was launched by the CNRS-LLACAN (Langage, langues et cultures d’Afrique Noire) laboratory. Its main objective is to document and describe around 20 languages within four years.

The first step was to put up an inventory of the least documented and/or most threatened languages in this country of West Africa. Then the teams began collecting elements which will later be part of the largest possible database on these languages. A database designed both for legacy and scientific research purposes.

Which will eventually leave us with two types of data: on one hand an audio and video corpus created thanks to the participation of Sorosoro, and the other, linguistic description material ranging from grammatical drafts to full synthesis.

On a broader scale, such systematic documentation should also enable to improve current knowledge on the Atlantic branch of the Niger-Congo language family. There are still many questions yet to be settled about the classification of this branch, thus the Sénélangues project should provide an important contribution to the understanding of how the languages of this family actually relate to each other.

You can already catch a glimpse on the outcomes of the Sorosoro/Sénélangues collaboration with a movie clip on the Baynunk language online as we speak. Meanwhile, editing goes on, and new videos should come about very shortly.