Survivor Languages and Semantic Innovation in West Africa’s Fertile Crescent

International audience This talk presents a new approach to reconstructing the cultural history of survivor languages - linguistic isolates and contact-peripheral varieties - spoken in the Sahel and West Africa’s so-called Fertile Crescent. In the Macina region of the Inland Niger Delta, one of Africa’s most ecologically and linguistically diverse zones, I explore how contemporary words for domesticated animals encode historical contact, trade, and ecological shifts. Drawing on a comparative lexical dataset covering languages and language groups of disputed higher-order affiliations, Mande, Dogon, Songhay, Bangime, and Fulfulde, as well as languages from eastern Africa (Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan), I trace semantic shifts that reflect deeper processes of linguistic innovation and diffusion across the Sahara.The study centers on terms that do not follow expected etymological patterns. For example, the Dogon and Bangime terms for 'cow' appear to derive from roots meaning 'tusk' or 'horn', possibly tied to pre-pastoral exchange networks. Likewise, Fulfulde loans into Dogon exhibit unexpected phonological adaptations. These irregularities are not noise but signals as clues to past semantic reassignments that reflect shifting subsistence strategies and identity formations.By applying a Concept-based method that transcends traditional genealogical classifications, I show how linguistic data from survivor languages can illuminate hidden histories of domestication and exchange. The Macina thus becomes both a case study and a conceptual lens through which to rethink the interplay of language, ecology, and precolonial mobility in West Africa.