Language

Learning Sakun would have required us to stay for at least a year at Sukur before beginning our anthropological fieldwork, and that was impossible. On the other hand it was essential to record the vocabulary of the areas of culture on which we were working, whether this related to artifacts or concepts of kinship and descent. We also wished to have interactions with our neighbors that did not have to be mediated by our assistants. There was at that time no lingua franca in the region. Very few adult residents of the Sukur plateau spoke more than a few words of English, which until recently was learned in schools on the plain. Older men often spoke some Fulfulde (Fulani) while younger men were frequently relatively fluent in Hausa, which is expanding in Adamawa state at the expense of Fulfulde. Although ND was once competent in Fulfulde, neither he nor the vast majority of respondents had the mastery required to use Fulfulde as the vehicular language of fieldwork. Moreover many Sukur regard Fulfulde as the language of a former oppressor. Therefore we and our assistants rapidly found ourselves developing an idiolect combining ‘rotten’ (as Ken Saro-Wiwa termed it) English grammar and verbs with Sakun nouns and a few adjectives and phrases.

Words and phrases were recorded, and to a very limited extent analyzed, as time allowed during fieldwork. A comparison of wordlists suggests that, while ND often made mistakes, his rendition of Sakun words is relatively systematic and therefore useful within limits. The enterprise was affected in 1992-93 by our assistants’ poor control of English. Our idiolect had to be negotiated at every step, and we sometimes found that “he went” meant “she is coming.” Thus, despite a concern for accuracy and reproducibility, there was always a danger that when we asked John Habga or Philip Sukur to reproduce an English phrase in Sakun, they gave us something rather different. In 1996 we were lucky to have been able to employ an undergraduate, Markus Makarma, with a substantially greater competence in English. Lacking formal training in linguistic analysis, I found it very hard to elicit explanations of why a phrase meant what they said it did. Indeed it was often difficult to identify separate words. There are good reasons for this, for example the phrase “ga-ca-va-n” (I show him) could be written in various ways as it comprises four elements: a verb root, an infixed 3rd person pronoun object, a verbal extension of uncertain significance, and a suffixed (and abbreviated) 1st person pronoun subject.

A revealing if slightly embarrassing example of our experience with Sakun is the pair of speeches delivered by ND and JS at a party thrown for us by the village on the day before we left Sukur in 1993. Judy and I decided that we should thank the village in their own language and wrote draft speeches in English which were translated into Sakun by a committee of John, Philip and ND. However, notice was short and I had to take a lot on trust. The speeches were well received but, on returning to them for purposes of analysis some ten years later, I can by no means always explain why they mean what I believe them to mean!

Readers should therefore be warned that these data are presented in only very partially digested form. Although I have done some cleaning up, I have neither the skills nor the opportunity for further analysis. I have been unable to check such analysis as I have done with Sakun speakers either while we were living at Sukur or later. There are inconsistencies both within the phrases and between phrases and lexicon. The phrases contain various words that have not yet been entered in the lexicon. We are delighted that Michael Thomas has taken over the analysis. His work should provide the Sukur with the wherewithal to, as time goes by, take over the study of their language.