A Grammar of Koyroboro (Koroboro) Senni (review)

This book is but one of the products from the author’s ongoing research on the Songhay family, a group of closely related languages (often referred to as dialects) spoken predominantly along or near the great bend of the Niger River in Mali. Other recent monographs by Jeffrey Heath include A grammar of Koyra Chiini: The Songhai of Timbuktu (Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998); Texts in Koroboro Senni (Köln: Köppe Verlag, 1998); and Texts in Koyra Chiini (Köln: Köppe Verlag, 1998). All of these publications are significant, as little detailed information on the synchronic structure of Songhay languages was formerly available in print. H’s extensive descriptions, all based on recent fieldwork with native speakers, will be particularly valuable as databases for future explorations into the family’s external genetic relations or for the study of local processes of language mixing (the genesis of certain Songhay languages may have included interesting creolization processes involving neighboring Afroasiatic languages). Clearly unrelated to the other language families of western Africa, Songhay has been included in the Nilo-Saharan phylum (Joseph Greenberg, Languages of Africa, 2nd edn., The Hague: Mouton, 1966), but H and most Songhay specialists remain sceptical that such a connection will ultimately be confirmed.

The book begins with a map showing the modern distribution of Songhay languages (xv) and an introduction (Ch. 1) with basic historical and dialectal data on the family. This discussion is continued in three appendices at the end of the book which describe in detail the structural features that distinguish local varieties of Koyraboro Senni: riverine dialects east of Gao (366–72), riverine dialects west of Gao (373–80), and the Fulan Kirya dialect of the Gourma (381–89). Examples from all of these varieties appear in the discussion. The book’s remaining chapters provide a highly structured description (without theory-specific formalisms) of the variety of Koyraboro Senni spoken in and around the city of Gao: typological overview (Ch. 2); phonology (Ch. 3); nouns, pronouns, and nominal derivation (Ch. 4); nominal inflection and NP syntax (Ch. 5); verbal voice and verb derivation (Ch. 6); VP structure (Ch. 7); discourse-related constructions (Ch. 8); sentence-level syntax and semantics (Ch. 9); and a final chapter entitled ‘Anaphora, logophorics, and reported speech’ (Ch. 10). Some of the many interesting typological highlights include a basic SOV word order, with certain verbs (mainly those having a less tangible relationship between subject and object, such as ‘see’, ‘believe’, etc.) requiring SVO; also, there is a series of mood-aspect-negation particles which follow the subject NP but precede both the object and the verb itself. The book finishes with a brief bibliography (390), a morpheme list (391–98), and a subject index (399–402).

As is true of H’s other monographs (see above), this book is now the authoritative reference for the varieties of Songhay it describes. One can only anticipate more such excellent descriptions of modern West African languages.