Casamancese creole in contact

Communication sur invitation au Seminar of Postcolonial Language Studies / Sprachkontakt und Kontaktsprachen. Université de Brème en Allemagne Casamancese creole is traditionally spoken in Ziguinchor, southern Senegal where its speakers occupied a privileged place in the Portuguese colonial era (from 1645 to 1886) and belonged to the upper class of the city (Juillard 1995; Moreau 1994). These Casamancese creole speakers are now in minority and in contact with French, the official language of Senegal, and with several other local languages.Until recently, Casamancese creole remains underdescribed (Chataigner 1963; Kihm 1994; Rougé 1988; Biagui 2012; Biagui et Quint 2013, Nunez 2015). The language practices of speakers of Casamancese creole are heterogeneous and exhibit daily fluid mixtures between Casamancese creole, French and Wolof (Nunez & Léglise, in press). Such cases are usually not discussed in most of the theoretical work on language contact, which usually make a functional separation of languages by establishing a dichotomy between matrix language and embedded language (i.e Myers-Scotton's works).Otherwise, this kind of contact situation including a Creole language and other languages that are typologically different, remain poorly described in the field of Creole studies, where most of the work focuses on situations of contact between a Creole and its lexifier (see Snow 2000).Basing my research on my data from a firsthand spontaneous corpus and an approach to contact linguistics (Auer 1999; Winford 2003 and Thomason 2001), I will discuss the most common theories in the field of contact linguistics (Myers-Sctotton 1993, 2002; Myers-Scotton & Jake in press; Auer 1999) and Creole studies (De Camp 1971; Bickerton 1973 and 1975; Ferguson 1956).