A couple of months ago a paper of mine, From the Qur’an to Christianity. Ethnolinguistic contact and religious conversion in West Africa, was pubished by Cahiers d’Études Africaines (n 239 (2020), p. 235-262, https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesafricaines.31573). This piece of research is a very unusual experiment for me, it is an attempt at reconstructing ethnolinguistic contact in the domain of religion and cultural practices accompanying it by using data in Mano, Kpelle and Manding (all Mande, spoken in Guinea). The conclusion I draw is that the language of Islam as practised by the Manding influenced the “traditional” religious language of the Kpelle, which in turn was incorporated in the Catholic religious register. Given a particular ethnolinguistic dynamics in the Catholic church in Guinea, the Catholic register of Kpelle came to influence the Catholic register of Mano (to the point of some prayers being word-by-word translations).
It is curious to look back at where I came from with this research. Continue reading