Language Contact in Guinea Language Contact in Guinea: The Case of Pular and Mande Varieties

International audience The aim of this study - resulting from the author's habilitation thesis - is to document the language contact situation in Guinea as well as to characterize mutual influences to which the languages of Guinea are exposed. The analysis focuses on the one hand on Pular and on the other hand on the Manding varieties Kakkaɓe, Jaxanka and Garanke as well as on the languages of the Soso-Jalunka group spoken in the mountainous region of Fuuta Jaloo. Particular attention will be paid to the effects of language contact on the phonology and morphology of the respective languages. It is hoped that this description will provide greater insight into language contact phenomena, especially since the languages mentioned have different typological features.The integration of borrowed linguistic material seems to be subject to the processes of adaptation or assimilation in both directions - in the present case from Pular to Mande and from Mande to Pular - i.e. the structural conditions of the recipient language determine which form borrowed sounds or sound sequences such as phonemes, syllables, lexemes or sentence structures take. Besides the aspect of time, two other factors play a crucial role in this process: the typological distance between the two contact languages and the demographic ratio of the speakers. On the one hand, mainly due to the influence of Mande languages, Pular has some peculiarities that distinguish it from other Fula varieties: the nasalization of the final vowel, the loss of alternations in initial sounds of verbs, partial changes in the canonical structure of nominal phrases, etc. On the other hand, some Mande varieties such as Jalunka, Kakkaɓe and Garanke are strongly influenced by Pular. This leads, among other things, to a large number of Fula loanwords in their vocabulary and the occurrence of implosives (ɓ, ɗ and ƴ) in the phoneme inventory.