In 2005, the Prague workshop titled ‘Sprachbund as a General and African Phenomenon’ proposed linguistic features that define the West African Sahel into what Alexandra Aikhenvald (2006) calls linguistic area. On this premise, researchers have looked closely down the line of comparative linguistics in an attempt to explore the areal features that define the West African region in general (Caron & Zima 2006, Pawlak 2012, Zima 2009, etc.) and northern Nigeria and the Lake Chad region (Ziegelmeyer 2009, 2018) in particular. 

The available research as to the entrenched areal features in what Ziegelmeyer calls the Wider Lake Chad Area (WLCA) is almost strictly structural, focusing on lexical and grammatical features of the languages of the region. However, since areal features that might define a linguistic area would extend not only to structural but also to semantic or grammatical concepts the study into the contact and areal features of a given linguistic area would need to go beyond the lexicon. My attempt is, therefore, to compare the conceptual processes of the languages of the Lake Chad region from a cognitive perspective starting first with the two major, and probably most intertwined northern Nigerian languages: Hausa and Fulfulde. For the purpose of this presentation, I focus on the semantic extensions of ‘mouth’ in the two languages – a pioneer attempt of a sort.  

This presentation is guided by the following questions: (i) what is the collocational nature of the term baki and hunnduko “mouth”, (ii) what are the semantic notions coded by these terms, (iii) what are the cognitive mechanisms involved in these mappings, and (iv) how does the coding in Hausa compare to that in Fulfulde?     

Chair: Georg Ziegelmeyer