Yalunka (also spelled Yalunke, Jalonke, Kjalonke, Dyalonké, Djallonké, or Dialonké)^[2] is the language of the Yalunka people of Guinea, Sierra Leone, Mali, and Senegal in West Africa. It is in the Mande language family. Yalunka is closely related to the Susu language.^[3]

Grammatical Features

The Yalunka language in Guinea is more order sensitive than many other languages. There is very little affixing that marks grammatical function of a word or requirements of agreement between words in the sentence. There is comparatively little morphology and only minor inflectional affixing. There are not long conjugations of verb tenses. Instead, the language relies on clause order to define the grammatical function of each word. For this reason, the linguistic concept of slots in the clause and phrase structure is effective in the description of the Yalunka language.^[4]

The clause structure of the Yalunka language is basically a series of slots. There is the possibility of a conjunction and adverb of time at the beginning of the clause. There is necessarily a subject noun phrase except in the case of imperative constructions. There is then the possibility of an internal adverb thereafter followed by an optionally appearing aspect marker. For transitive verbs, a direct object may appear after the aspect marker which is followed by the verb. The verb is the minimal utterance of the Yalunka language, e.g. /siga/ 'go'. The verb may optionally be accompanied by a suffix which does not usually co-occur with the aspect marker (except with /yi/). After the verb there are two different kinds of obliques, one occurring before and one after the /nɛn/ which is a particle shrouded in a respectable degree of mystery. Those obliques occurring before the /nɛn/ tend to relate closely to the meaning of the verb and modify it, while those obliques to the right of /nɛn/ are post positions of location, post positions of time, and adverbs. They come in that order. After the obliques there is another rather limber particle /nun/ and finally a whole class of colorful emphatic markers that bear a much higher tone than the previous words in the sentence. All categories except the verb are optional.

References