Grammatical Cognates and the Dogon Diasystem

International audience Proto-Dogon is the hypothesised ancestral languages from which all of the modern Dogon languages emerged. Today the twenty-some distinct Dogon languages spoken across the Bandiagara region vary immensely with respect to number and animacy marking. However there is converging research (Heath 2022 & various; Zuk 2024; Prokhorov 2024) that Proto-Dogon made a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns. There is continuing discussion as to which modern Dogon languages best-preserve the archaic structures of Proto-Dogon: Yanda Dom (Prokhorov 2024), Najamba-Kindige (Hantgan, Personal Communication), or Jamsay and Donno So (Calame-Griaule 1956). This paper is a contribution to the conversation about the structures and etyma of Proto-Dogon. By employing internal-reconstruction based upon the grammars of Heath (various), Prokhorov (2012), McPherson (2013), Dyachkov (Under Review), and the CLDF transformation of the Comparative Dogon Wordlist (Heath et al. 2023) we present several Pan-Dogon reflexes and the manner in which they diverged in function and form from inherited etyma throughout the language family.Our hypothesis is that Proto-Dogon did not overtly mark number on the noun, and this is line with a larger tendency for Niger-Congo identified by Creissels (In prep). Rather, in Dogon, as elsewhere in Niger-Congo we see the appearance of various singulative and plurative marking strategies across the system, generally emerging from the hitherto proposed, previously independent, deictic and personal pronouns.