1.4 Habitat, cultural life, economy, and religion
There are two types of agglomerations in Tagbana regions: the kàɉīōːrò ‘the camp’ and the kàːrà ‘the villages’. The first type is the type of agglomerations located far from villages. The sites are preferably chosen along rivers and on fertile land. This type of habitat includes members of the same family on a land that is theirs and on which they grow food, plants, and also breed animals. Some celebration ceremonies can take place in these agglomerations. However, all inhabitants have an apartment in the villages where meeting of major events such as weddings, funerals, large meetings, and making family decisions are held. Nowadays, the villages have been enlarged and that some have become towns.
The cultural life of the populations of Fronan is not in margin with the other Senufo languages’ cultural values. During the periods of celebration, rhythmic melodies such as nã̀gbògō, gbòfé, and sìtā serve to cheer up the population. In addition to these dances, there are other types of dances, such as hɔ̀-jùgò and kũ̀mbūō masks, which are reserved for male initiates and the mask ã̀gblí reserved exclusively for initiated women. All these forms of events are mostly traditional. The practitioners of these dances are more or less professional. They do so only on occasions of weddings, baptisms, funerals, and any other ceremonies. Note that dances from other neighbouring cultures exist as well.
The Tagbana are farmers and they live from agriculture. Their main food are cereal and yams. They also grow peanuts. Some crops are produced in large quantities for trade and export. Commercial crops include cotton, ←24 | 25→cashew nuts, and mango. They also move from the North to the South or West to grow cocoa and coffee. Note that Ivory Coast is the main producer of cacao. They are also breeders and opt for large cattle, especially oxen and pigs. This breeding is indirect. Because they are focused on field work, the livestock are entrusted to shepherds. The Tagbana also practise hunting with instruments such as arrows and local firearms such as the gun powder called gbèŋgéʔè.
Besides animism, Christianity and Islam are practised in the region. Christianity was introduced by the colonizers and Islam by the anti-colonialist Samory Toure.
Fròʔò is a dialect of Tagbana without writing conventions so far. Etymologically, Fròʔò comes from a derivational processes of the verb fùòːró ‘slip’ deverbalized to frò-ʔò ‘a slide’. Fronan could be a composition of fròʔò + nã̄, pronounced frò.ʔò.nã̄, or frònã̄ ‘fronan’. Alternatively, fròʔò ‘slip’ and nã̄ ‘designate the place or the location’, meaning ‘the place where we slide’. Not a physical slide, the way a person slips and falls down. But rather, the kind of slide here concerns the language handling, the speech. In the old days, in the culture of the Tagbana speakers, as in almost all African cultures, messages from one locality to another were sent by messengers. It was said to those who did not have a good handling of the language that they slipped. The handling included not only the speech but also the rules Fròʔò speakers obey when they have to address the elders.
The speakers of the locality of Fronan are called fùòːlò or some would say fòhòbélé. And the language is Fròʔò or Fòmũ̀ for some. According to the last general population census of the country (2014), the municipality of Fronan has around 39,000 people speaking Fròʔò.
The city of Fronan is composed of six villages, namely Darakokaha, Offiakaha, Nyenankaha, Souroukaha, Tafolo, and Kanangonon. Note that these villages are considered to have the same dialect, although they maintain some dialectal distinctions. See Fig. 2 for the map showing the place where the language is spoken.
Fig. 2: Map showing the locality of Fronan, IGT University of Cocody, Abidjan (2008)
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Some works exist on Tagbana in general. Clamens (1952) provides an overview of the main grammatical properties of the language.
Herault and Mlanhoro (1973) worked on tàkper, a Tagbana dialect spoken in the city of Niakaramandougou. In their work, they presented a phonological sketch, including a tonal study, followed by a corpus of the data on which this sketch is based.
Katia Kamara C. (1988) contains a lexicon of Tagbana with translations in German called Lexikon der Tagbana-Sprache.
Yago (1989, 1991) wrote on Tafire, another Tagbana dialect. Yago respectively describes the noun class system and the vowel nasality of Tafire. He determined seven nominal classes of the Tafire based on a template made by a noun, a pronoun, and a presentative.
Mensah and Tchagbale (1993) introduce briefly the Tagbana languages and some Gur languages, especially the Gur languages of Côte d’Ivoire. Their work consists in several corpora and in descriptions of the phonological system of these languages.
Manessy (1996a,b) proposed an elaboration of the nominal classes of Tagbana.
The collection of the data consists of IPA transcripts of words. A transcribed word is retained as part of the corpus as if it was articulated identically by 8 persons out of 10, each obeying some criteria. Informants are 40–90 years old with a perfect command of the language; people whose mother tongue is the dialect of Fròʔò and who have a perfect command also of the languages of the neighbouring localities to avoid borrowing phenomena; people whose native language is the Fròʔò and who in addition to mastering the neighbouring languages also have a language competence of neighbouring dialects. This criterion would also avoid borrowing from elsewhere that we call far-borrowed and people whose mother tongue is Fròʔò and who mastered the French language perfectly to avoid misunderstandings and problems of interpretation.
The book has several chapters. Chapter 2 deals with the sounds of the dialect and the distinctive features. In this section, an overview of the distinctive features for the consonants and vowels of Fròʔò is proposed.
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Chapter 3 deals with the syllable structures. The first section provides an overview of the underlying syllables structure and syllabification in Fròʔò. The syllable is defined as a unit of prosodic organization located in the prosodic hierarchy between the mora and the foot, and it plays an important role in the phonology of Fròʔò. The second section deals with the phonotactics, the principles of the language that describe the constraints on strings of speech sounds or segments. The goal is not to discuss the existence of the syllable but to show the way sounds are organized in syllable forms and to address some phonological effects like vowel lengthening and features sharing in the voicing for example. The third section is about loanwords and their adaptation processes according to the phonotactic restrictions. Fròʔò imports many loanwords from French and neighbouring areas, and recently also some from English when specially a Fròʔò speaker is brought to speak English words in Fròʔò. The resyllabification