MOUSSA BAMBA, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Linguistic Data Consortium/IRCS

My research programme is to prepare an electronic database for the lexicon of three Mandekan (Manding) languages of the Mande group of the Niger-Congo family: (a) Bambara (Bamanankan or Bamanan), (b) Mawukakan (also known as Mawu, Mahou or Mau) and (c) Odienne Jula. Bambara, considered to be the oldest form of the Manding subgroup, is the bigest and the most studied language of the sub-group; Odienne Jula has the opposite tone patterns of Bambara; and Mawukakan is my own mother tongue within the sub-group. There are many forms of glossaries of Bambara, mainly in French, but the only elaborate dictionary known to us is Petit dictionnaire Bambara-Francais, Francais-Bambara (1981) (pp 339), which is very limited because it is a two-way dictionary. Dioula dÕOdienne (parler de Samatiguila): Materiel Lexical (1982) (pp.130), mimeographed by the Institut de Liguistique Appliquee, Universite dÕAbidjan, is, to my knowledge, the only lexicon produced on Odienne Jula. As for Mawukakan, only Document Lexical Maukakan (parler manding du Maou) (1982) (pp. 59) and a fragment of Mawu lexicon: Mawukakan Vocabulary (1995-96) are available. The latter is stored electronically at the Phonetic Laboratory of the Linguistics Department, University of Pennsylvania. None of these is fully prepared electronically such that they can be easily updated, nor are they developed such that different dictionaries can be produced from them to meet the needs of different users at different times. Once the database is now electronically developed for these three Manding languages, other varieties such as Maninka (spoken in Guinea-Conakry and Mali), Mandinka (Senegal and Gambia), Konyakan (Guinea-Conakry), Abidjan-Jula (Cote d'Ivoire), and Bobo-Jula (Burkina-Faso) can easily be added to the database, given that the Manding languages share at least 75% of common vocabulary.

Our main strategy is first, to update all the existing sources (both the ones listed above and others that will become available later) , and then enlarge the database to incorporate new items to meet the present-day demands, as well as anticipate the needs of the computer age of the 21st century. The Manding languages together are spoken by more than 6 million people spread across the West African countries of Mali, Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina-Faso, Senegal, Gambia and Guinea-Bissau. I am a theoretical phonologist by training. My area of specialization is autosegmental-metrical phonology. The title of my doctoral dissertation is De lÕinteraction entre tons et accent (1991) from the Universite du Quebec a Montreal. Since the Fall of 1994, I have been a Postdoctoral Fellow at IRCS. I have been actively involved in the teaching of Manding languages both in Africa and outside for many years (Maninka at the Universite de Guinee,Conakry, Guinea (1971-75), Abidjan-Jula at the Universite dÕAbidjan, Cote d'Ivoire (1977-83), and Bambara at the African Studies Program, UPENN (1994 to date).