Dogon
Vladimir Plungian
University of Moscow
Dogon is reputed for its extremely high dialectal diversity: there are more than 15 dialects attested, most of them being mutually unintelligible. The sketch is based on one of the central dialects, tommoso, very important sociolinguistically but not well described yet (more or less like all the other Dogon dialects).
Typologically, Dogon is characterized by a quite unusual combination of "agglutinating" verb (with a variety of aspectual and temporal markers within the wordform) and "isolating" noun (without any affixal markers at all, even number and case markers being clitical). The sketch provides a short phonological and morphological description, a concise account of grammatical categories and derivational system and an overview of main syntactic properties of Dogon (special emphasis is laid on converbs/participles and "serialization" in clause combining). [written in French].
ISBN 9783929075465. Languages of the World/Materials 64. 47 pp. 1995.
