Doctoral Dissertation Research: Linguistic and Political borders in the Senegambia region

1889年，柏林会议正式承认了法国和英国殖民列强在冈比亚河周围划定的边界，这是被称为“争夺非洲”的进程的一部分。这种殖民边界在塞内加尔和冈比亚两国之间留下了持久的政治裂痕，尽管这两个国家有着共同的历史、种族和土著语言。被这一边界划分的主要民族语言群体之一是沃尔夫人。尽管沃尔夫语仍然是这些国家之间重要的共同语言，但发言者认识到塞内加尔和冈比亚的沃尔夫语存在差异。语言经常被用来构建和加强民族、社会和国家认同，并能唤起说话者之间强烈的团结或分离意识。正如彼得·奥尔所说，国家边界不仅有助于构建语言边界，而且语言差异也有助于加强国家边界。在布赖恩·约瑟夫博士的指导下，简·米奇将在塞内加尔边境地区进行为期8个月的社会语言学采访和对沃尔夫人的民族志田野调查。本论文旨在考察具有共同民族认同但民族认同不同的人的语言实践，探索政治边界在这些年轻国家的语言实践中的作用，获取关于不同身份亲缘关系(民族、种族、宗教等)的数据，并将语言学结果与其他关于政治边界的语言学研究进行比较。这项研究将为有关非洲国家实力及其边界的政治学问题提供语言学方面的信息。这项研究还将导致建立一个沃尔夫口语语料库，该语料库将捕捉沃尔夫口头传统的一些重要方面，如民间故事和谚语。

A border drawn around the Gambia River by French and British colonial powers was officially recognized in the 1889 by the Berlin Conference, as part of the process known as the "Scramble for Africa." This colonial boundary has left an enduring political rift between the nations of Senegal and The Gambia in spite of their shared history, ethnicities, and indigenous languages. One of the major ethnolinguistic groups divided by this border is the Wolof. Although Wolof continues to be an important shared language between these countries, speakers recognize divergence in the Wolof of Senegal and The Gambia. Language is often used to construct and reinforce ethnic, social, and national identity and can evoke a strong sense of solidarity or separation among speakers. As Peter Auer has argued, not only can the national border help construct a linguistic border, but the linguistic divergence can also serve to reinforce the national border. This dissertation will focus on the border in a multiethnic, multilingual area where ethnicity is strongly associated with language.Under the direction of Dr. Brian Joseph, Jane Mitsch will spend eight months in the Senegambia border areas conducting sociolinguistic interviews and ethnographic fieldwork among Wolof people. This dissertation aims to examine the linguistic practices of people with shared ethnic identity but different national identity, to explore the role of the political border in the linguistic practices of these young nations, to elicit data on different identity affinities (national, ethnic, religious etc.), and to compare the linguistic results to other linguistic studies of political borders. This study will bring linguistic input to political science questions about the strength of African nations and their borders. This research will also lead to the creation of a corpus of spoken Wolof that will capture some of the important aspects of the Wolof oral tradition such as folktales and proverbs.