Stefano Manfredi

• PhD
• Researcher at French National Centre for Scientific Research

In this essay, we analyze the processes through which the actors of the December Revolution in Sudan—being themselves revolutionary activists or counterrevolutionary promoters—use language for political and economic purposes. Based on an ethnographic analysis of both oral and written language practices, the study describes the metasemiotic changes...

Widely attested in both creole and non-creole languages of the Atlantic basin, the function word o has been traditionally described as a ‘sentence/phrase final particle’, owing to its typical syntactic behaviour, rather than to its multiple grammatical meanings. Based on the corpus-driven analysis of the NaijaSynCor, a ~400K words corpus of spoken...

Despite the relatively large amount of linguistic and anthropological data on kinship terminologies in the languages of the Nuba Mountains, we still lack cross-linguistic studies attempting at reconstructing the areal history of this highly variable lexical field. This paper aims at comparing the formal and semantic features of kin terms across the...

Pain Constructions (PCs) constitute a class of experiential constructions expressing situations that involve unpleasant physical experiences (e.g. headache, burning eyes, dizziness, etc.). Previous cross-linguistic comparisons have shown that, though languages do not have dedicated morphosyntactic structures for encoding pain, there are certain con...

The Baggara Belt constitutes the southernmost periphery of the Arabic-speaking world. It stretches over 2500 km from Nigeria to Sudan and it is largely inhabited by Arab semi-nomadic cattle herders. Despite its common sociohistorical background, the ethnography of Baggara nomads is complex, being the result of a long series of longitudinal migratio...

Since Quint (2006), no general account of the languages spoken in the Nuba Mountains has ever been published in French. This paper aims at filling that gap. In section 1, we introduce the various languages spoken today in the Nuba Mountains, emphasizing the importance of native tongues but also mentioning the other languages in use in that region,...

The notion of calquing refers to the transfer of semantic and syntactic patterns deprived of morphophonological matter. By providing examples of lexical and grammatical calques in a number of Arabic dialects and Arabic-based contact languages, this chapter identifies ways to relate the process of calquing to Van Coetsem's psy-cholinguistic principl...

This volume offers a synthesis of current expertise on contact-induced change in Arabic and its neighbours, with thirty chapters written by many of the leading experts on this topic. Its purpose is to showcase the current state of knowledge regarding the diverse outcomes of contacts between Arabic and other languages, in a format that is both acces...

This introductory chapter gives an overview of the aims, scope, and approach of the volume, while also providing a thematic bibliography of the most significant previous literature on Arabic and contact-induced change.

This article explores the official discourse behind the regimentation of the linguistic situation of South Sudan and assesses its impact on local linguistic practices against the backdrop of a sociolinguistic survey and interviews with government officials. After a presentation of the language situation of the country, the article focuses on Juba A...

The present volume provides an overview of current trends in the study of language contact involving Arabic. By drawing on the social factors that have converged to create different contact situations, it explores both contact-induced change in Arabic and language change through contact with Arabic. The volume brings together leading scholars who a...

The present volume provides an overview of current trends in the study of language contact involving Arabic. By drawing on the social factors that have converged to create different contact situations, it explores both contact-induced change in Arabic and language change through contact with Arabic. The volume brings together leading scholars who a...

In this study I provide a description of the morphosyntax and the functions of demonstratives in Juba Arabic and Ki-Nubi, two closely related Arabic-based contact languages. The study describes the process of acquisition of demonstrative pronouns and determiners and it explains the formal and functional changes that have taken place in the demonstr...

This article explores the official discourse behind the regimentation of the linguistic situation of South Sudan and assesses its impact on local linguistic practices against the backdrop of a sociolinguistic survey and interviews with government officials. After a presentation of the language situation of the country, the article focuses on Juba A...

Le présent ouvrage constitue la première grammaire descriptive du pidgin-créole à base lexicale arabe nommé árabi júba (Fr. arabe de Juba, Ang. Juba Arabic, ci-après indiqué par l'abréviation AJ). À ce jour, l'AJ a encore peu attiré l'attention des créolistes. Cela s'explique par le fait que les linguistes travaillant sur les théories de la pidgini...

This chapter aims at analysing the results of language contact involving Arabic in the light of Van Coetsem’s psycholinguistic principle of language dominance. By assuming a basic distinction between two transfer types (i.e. Recipient Language agentivity vs. Source Language agentivity), I will go through the outcomes of language contact involving A...

Forthcoming in Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. Pre-print version, please contact the author before citing: manfredi@vjf.cnrs.fr

A follow-up of the CorpAfroAs project, this paper presents a typologically-oriented study of the intonation of Topic and Focus in four Afroasiatic languages (Zaar, Tamasheq, Juba Arabic and Tripoli Arabic), in relation to their phonological and information structures. The different prosodic systems represented in the study - i.e. the demarcative ac...

This chapter aims to analyse the effects of language revitalization on the ethnolinguistic identity of a minority community living in the Nuba Mountains region (western Sudan), the laggori.

This article aims at describing the forms, the distribution and the functions of demonstratives in Kordofanian Baggara Arabic, an Arabic dialect spoken by semi-nomadic cattle herders living in the Southern Kordofan State of the Republic of Sudan. Based on an oral corpus gathered on field, the study analyses in typological perspective the morphosynt...

This article aims at describing the forms, the distribution and the functions of demonstratives in Kordofanian Baggara Arabic, an Arabic dialect spoken by semi-nomadic cattle herders living in the Southern Kordofan State of the Republic of Sudan. Based on an oral corpus gathered on field, the study analyses in typological perspective the morphosynt...

Some Comments on the Nominal Plural in Arabic Creol in Juba. This paper aims at describing the encoding of nominal plurality in Juba Arabic, an Arabic based pidgin-creole spoken in the Republic of South Sudan. Generally speaking, Juba Arabic stands out from other creole languages because of the presence of multiple strategies for encoding nominal p...

The article discusses the information structure of Juba Arabic, an Arabic-based pidgincreole of South Sudan, showing how the expression of topic and focus is the result of a complex interaction of morphosyntactic and prosodic means. While the lexical elements used in the expression of topic and focus are Arabic-derived, no such influence can be fou...

Arabic is one of the world’s largest languages, spoken natively by about 300 million speakers. It is by a large margin the largest language in Africa (nearly 200 million speakers), and one of the biggest in Asia (120 million). It has been estimated to be the fifth largest language in the world in terms of native speakers. Strength of numbers alone...

The paper summarizes the language and educational policy of the Republic of South Sudan against the backdrop of a sociolinguistic survey conducted in Juba, South Sudan, in the months of July-August 2013, and aiming at a better understanding of the role, uses and beliefs surrounding the use of Juba Arabic, an Arabic-based pidgincreole widely used in...

This paper aims at providing a linguistic overview of Rendók, an Arabic-based secret language developed by the urban youth of Northern and Central Sudan. Generally speaking, Rendók does not represent a coherent linguistic entity; it rather constitutes a large set of encrypting strategies that vary a great deal in accord to the sociolinguistic backg...