A border drawn around the Gambia River by French and British colonial powers was officially recognized in the 1889 by the Berlin Conference, as part of the process known as the "Scramble for Africa." This colonial boundary has left an enduring political rift between the nations of Senegal and The Gambia in spite of their shared history, ethnicities, and indigenous languages. One of the major ethnolinguistic groups divided by this border is the Wolof. Although Wolof continues to be an important shared language between these countries, speakers recognize divergence in the Wolof of Senegal and The Gambia. Language is often used to construct and reinforce ethnic, social, and national identity and can evoke a strong sense of solidarity or separation among speakers. As Peter Auer has argued, not only can the national border help construct a linguistic border, but the linguistic divergence can also serve to reinforce the national border. This dissertation will focus on the border in a multiethnic, multilingual area where ethnicity is strongly associated with language.
Under the direction of Dr. Brian Joseph, Jane Mitsch will spend eight months in the Senegambia border areas conducting sociolinguistic interviews and ethnographic fieldwork among Wolof people. This dissertation aims to examine the linguistic practices of people with shared ethnic identity but different national identity, to explore the role of the political border in the linguistic practices of these young nations, to elicit data on different identity affinities (national, ethnic, religious etc.), and to compare the linguistic results to other linguistic studies of political borders. This study will bring linguistic input to political science questions about the strength of African nations and their borders. This research will also lead to the creation of a corpus of spoken Wolof that will capture some of the important aspects of the Wolof oral tradition such as folktales and proverbs.
