Introduction to Kujamaat Jóola
The Kujamaat Jóola people, who call themselves Kujamaat and their language Kujamutay, live in the Basse-Casamance region of Senegal, West Africa. Jóola is a cluster of dialects, of which Kujamaat, sometimes called Foñy, and Kasa are the most important.1 The total number of speakers in 1998 was about 186,000 (Grimes 2002). Kujamaat Jóola belongs to the Atlantic (sometimes called West Atlantic) language family, of which the best-known languages are Wolof, the national language of Senegal, and Fula. Looked at in terms of linguistic history, the Atlantic languages form a branch descending from the most widespread language family in Africa, Niger-Congo, which is also one of the largest language families in the world. Kujamaat Jóola has a number of features – most particularly its intricate system of noun classes and agreement – which are remarkably similar to those of the distantly related but much larger and better-known subfamily of Niger-Congo, the Bantu languages.
The most pervasive and characteristic morphological features of Kujamaat Jóola are (i) a simple and elegant vowel harmony system, (ii) an extensive noun class or gender system, (iii) rich agreement morphology, and (iv) agglutinative verbal morphology. We will be exploring these and other topics in Kujamaat Jóola morphology.
We have chosen Kujamaat Jóola because its morphology, though complex and sometimes unusual, is highly regular, which makes it an excellent teaching vehicle. The morphology is also spread out across nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The inflection includes some of the most common types that one is likely to find: gender and agreement, and verbal tense and aspect. J. David Sapir has written a superb grammar from which most of the Kujamaat Jóola data are drawn and which provides a wonderfully lucid description of the language and especially of the morphology. The grammar has stood the test of time: it speaks to us as clearly today as it did when it was written over forty years ago.
Of all the distinct aspects of language, morphology is the most deeply entwined with the others. There is no way to talk about morphology without also talking about phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Pho n ology is especially important, for there is no way to get at the morpho logy of a language without first stripping away the effects of phonology on the forms of words. For that reason our introduction to Kujamaat Jóola morphology must be preceded by a brief introduction to its phonology.
The phonemic inventory of Kujamaat Jóola is given in (1) and (2).2 Kujamaat Jóola has a set of voiceless and voiced stops in three places of articulation – bilabial, alveolar, and velar – and nasal consonants in four – bilabial, alveolar, palatal, and velar. It has voiceless and voiced postalveolar affricates /ʧ/ and /ʤ/, transcribed here as <c> and <j> (following Sapir 1965), voiceless labiodental and alveolar fricatives /f/ and /s/, two liquids /l/ and /r/, and labiovelar and palatal glides /w/ and /y/. The voiceless glottal fricative /h/ rarely occurs.
Vowels occur in tense–lax pairs and may be short or long; what Sapir represents as schwa is realized as “a tense unrounded high-mid central vowel” under stress (Sapir 1965: 6), and is the tense counterpart to /a/. Tense high vowels are underscored (i and u). The lax counterparts of tense /e/ and /o/ are /ε/ and /ɔ/ respectively:
The organization of this vowel chart follows standard linguistic practice. It reflects the position of the tongue during articulation and resonance, with the high vowels [i, i, u, u] at the top of the triangle, and the low vowel [a] at the bottom. Vowels on the left are articulated toward the front of the vocal tract, and those on the right farther back.
Kujamaat Jóola words showing all of the vowels are listed in (3):
Nasal–nasal and nasal–consonant clusters are very common. Of these, only /mb/ and /nd/ occur freely, including at the beginning of a word; /nn/, /mf/ (transcribed here as <nf>, following Sapir), and /ns/ clusters occur only word-internally. The remaining clusters can occur in either internal or final position in a word. In all cases the two consonants have the same place of articulation. Both /lt/ and /rt/ occur in word-internal position, as well, though very rarely. There are no other consonant clusters. Some examples are given in (4):3
Kujamaat Jóola syllables are generally of the shape C(onsonant) V(owel), although V, VC, CVC, and CVNC (where N represents any nasal) syllables occur as well. Vowels may be long or short. Stress is stem-initial.
The most salient feature of Kujamaat Jóola phonology is its pervasive vowel harmony. Vowel harmony is the agreement among vowels in a word with respect to a given feature, such as height, rounding, or backness. We will explore Kujamaat Jóola vowel harmony in depth in Morphology and Phonology. Until then, keep an eye out for how certain morphemes influence the shape of Kujamaat Jóola stems, and, more often, vice versa.
1 The Kujamaat Jóola data presented here comes almost exclusively from J. David Sapir’s 1965 grammar, A Grammar of Diola-Fogny. We also used Sapir (1970, 1975), Thomas and Sapir (1967), Hopkins (1990), and Gero and Levinsohn (1993).
2 We choose to present the Kujamaat Jóola data in the transcription systems used by Sapir because being able to deal with different transcription systems is an essential skill for all linguists. Elsewhere, we generally use IPA transcription unless otherwise indicated.
3 Consonant clusters will be written <nj>, <nc> , <ng> , and <nk>, respectively, following Sapir. We do not represent assimilation in place of the nasal to the following consonant (e.g., we write /nk/ for phonetic [ŋk]).
