Kujamaat Jóola

(Diola Fogny)

Material collected by J.David Sapir Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of Virginia
ds8s@virginia.edu

This web site, which is under construction, will make available on the web Folklore and Language materials collected in the 1960s among the Kujamaat Jóola (Diola Fogny) who live in the Casamance region of Sénégal. On the above map the people can be found in the area including the town of Bignona and the villages to the North, including Bitibiit, Katinong, Sindian etc.

Kujamaat, numbering about 65,000 speakers, represents one dialect out of group of dialects along with other distinct languages in their own right. Click here for a map of the Jóola family that was compiled by Alistair Kennedy in 1961.

As a first step in setting up this web page we are posting these items:

• The Kujamaat World: a photograph gallery.
• The Language:
  • A dictionary of the Kujamaat-Jóola language with French and English translations.
  • Kujamaat-Phonetics
  • Le Diola et le temps - the section of the paper devoted to the Kujamaat language including a discussion of the verbal inflection. (published in Bulletin de de l'Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, 1967) (A PDF file, in French, ).
  • Two papers on the tense/lax distinction in Jóola phonology:
    • Big and Thin (published in Linguage in Society (University of Cambridge Press)) [A PDF file]
    • Kujamaat-Jóola Phonetics.(a technical paper) [A PDF file]
  • A Grammar of Diola-Fogny has been reprinted by Cambridge University Press (2011).
  • Diola in the Polyglotta Africana, in African Language Review, Vol 9 (1970-71) [A PDF file] This paper examines two Jóola word lists that appeared in Sigismund Koelle's 1854 Polyglotta Aficana. Koelle's remarks on his two Jóola informants.

• Link to Folkways download website, where you will find excerpts from The Music of the Diola-Fogny an anthology I recorded in 1960 - 61.
• A sample of extemporaneous funeral songs, Buñansaη, as sung by Añara Jeme of Jilakunda.
• A folktale, as told by Fofana Badji, recorded 1960: Hyena and Lizard