In the following video, Fallou Coly gives us some expressions of space and time in Baynunk, small but very useful words in everyday life.

Baynunk is spoken in Casamance (Senegal), as well as neighbouring Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, and belongs to the big Niger-Congo family (North-Atlantic branch, Tenda-nyun group).

In 2006 website Ethnologue.com estimated the number of speakers of Baynunk at 6,200. According to UNESCO criteria, it thus qualifies to be considered as an endangered language. Baynunk is one of the 17 languages benefiting from the codification and recognition program for minority languages initiated in the 1970’s in Senegal.

As usual in our videos, all of the words are translated into three languages, French, English and Spanish, and rendered in their Baynunk transcription as well. This is a chance to discover a very distinctive script which gave us a hard time.

Read more on Baynunk

Watch all videos in Baynunk

Linguist: Sokhna Bao-Diop

Image & sound: Muriel Lutz, assisted by Cheikh Tidiane Sall

Editing: Caroline Laurent

Video created within the ANR Sénélangues project