Let’s say in the course of doing fieldwork on a language, you come across a speech surrogate. What do you do? How do you begin to unravel the system and discover its inner workings?
As with most of my posts, I’ll focus on musical surrogates here, though I believe the methodology would be largely similar regardless of the modality.
With a musical surrogate language, chances are that there will be a preexisting repertoire of songs or commonly used phrases. While of course you should record as many of these as possible (more on the overall health of speech surrogates in another post), I wouldn’t recommend starting here to decode the surrogate unless the connection to speech is immediately apparent. The reason for this is that this material is likely to have been learned by rote, and quite possibly as music first before understanding its linguistic underpinnings. The repertoire may have been passed down largely unchanged from generation to generation, while the spoken language slowly evolved, creating a confusing distance between the two. It may not even be based on speech at all, but rather on a sung repertoire, as in the case of the Sambla balafon (McPherson 2018, McPherson and James ms). Finally, in most cultures, musical surrogate languages in their natural setting are full of proverbs and other figurative language, which may make it difficult to translate and compare spoken language to surrogate speech, especially if fieldwork is in its early stages or there is no thorough grammatical description available. Thus, even though the fixed repertoire may be the most natural, it is likely not the best place to start.
Instead, start with spontaneity. Ask how to say simple things. Treat it as you would regular elicitation for the spoken language. Depending upon the natural productivity of the surrogate language, this will be an easier or harder task for your musician consultants. In this post, I’ll describe my experience with the Sambla balafon, where the tradition remains highly productive. We’ll have other posts that describe cases where that may not be true, though I would maintain that testing productive phrases in this way is still an informative exercise regardless of how natural it is for the consultants.
It boils down to this: Elicitation with musical surrogate languages is essentially a kind of wug testing. Wug testing takes a morphological or phonological pattern observable in natural speech and asks speakers to apply it to novel forms. It reveals what speakers know about the rules and patterns in their language, rules that we infer from observing regular speech but in this context, speakers could simply be reproducing forms that they have heard rather than productively applying those rules. When we ask a musician to produce a novel phrase in the surrogate language, we are essentially asking, “What rules have they internalized from the repertoire or tradition and what can that reveal about how the relationship between the spoken and surrogate language?” Ideally it can go a step further and also reveal something about the way the spoken language works.
For the Sambla balafon, my initial meeting with Mamadou Diabate in Vienna provided me with a range of phrases on the balafon, most of which Mamadou himself had offered. This included some everyday phrases like “Where are you from?” or “What are you doing?” as well as a couple elicited phrases that I snuck in, like “I will buy a goat” vs. “I will buy goats”. Though some of the phrases were more complex than my level of Seenku understanding at the time, it was apparent that factors like tone and vowel length were playing a role in the surrogate language.
When I returned to Burkina Faso the following summer, I was determined to get to the bottom of how exactly tone and syllable structure worked, and whether there were any other phonological contrasts that I was missing. I spent a few days with Mamadou’s nephew Nigo Diabate focusing on elicitation. I began with a simple sentence whose tones I felt more or less confident about:
mó sḭ̌ səmâ nɛ̏
‘I am dancing’
Then, just as in regular spoken elicitation, I systematically varied one element, in this case, the subject pronoun, swapping out the High-toned 1sg mó for a Superhigh-toned 1pl mi̋:
mi̋ sḭ̌ səmâ nɛ̏
‘We are dancing’
Sure enough, only the beginning of the phrase differed on the balafon, with the pronoun mi̋ corresponding to a higher note on the balafon. Transcriptions of these two phrases are provided below, where the Seenku names of the notes of the balafon are abbreviated along the left-hand side and the square of the grid is filled in when that note is struck. (See Strand 2009 or McPherson 2018 for discussion of Sambla tuning and note names.)
After a few iterations with different subjects, I varied the verb, changing from səmâ ‘dance’ with a contour tone to kȍeewith a level extralow tone.
mó sḭ̌ kȍee nɛ̏
‘I am singing’
Sure enough, the notes corresponding to the verb dropped to the same level.
Of course, the relationship between the spoken and surrogate language may not always be straightforward or one-to-one. For the Sambla balafon, for instance, elicitation sometimes reveals free variation, such as the following two musical equivalents of ȁ sḭ̌ səmâ nɛ̏ ‘s/he is dancing’, with an extralow-toned subject pronoun:
Notice that in both of these cases, the səmâ nɛ̏ part is played lower on the instrument than it was with the other pronouns. I suspect this has to do with the initial extralow tone, but it remains a bit of a mystery, since when asked, a musician will also accept it played higher up.
Cases of variation like this highlight the importance of (1) recording the same phrase more than once, preferably on different occasions to avoid self-priming, and (2) collecting data from multiple consultants, if possible. This can help triage errors from true variation, identify which version might be most natural, and determine how consistent the surrogate language system is between practitioners. Much of this is common sense from wug testing, highlighting once again the connection between surrogate languages and these other types of experimental work.
Before wrapping up this post, it’s worth pointing out that different consultants will have differing levels of tolerance for this kind of elicitation. In my experience in Mali and Burkina Faso, classical wug testing in the spoken language is a near impossible task (“But that’s not a word…”), but the Sambla balafonists have been fairly tolerant of my bizarre requests to say unusual things on the instrument. Thus, elicitation work on speech surrogates offers a unique source of “external evidence” (Churma 1979) to probe the phonology of a language where more traditional methods like wug testing may fail.
Nevertheless, there are limits. The Sambla balafonists are much more willing to provide phrases than single words, since phrases offer some possibility of disambiguation and thus render the message more natural. For the same reasons, they are not too keen on meaningless frame sentences that would allow us to look for subtle differences in the musical rendition of single words. As Mamadou has told me, it just doesn’t mean anything and thus isn’t true balafon speech. This may depend on the tradition, since I have seen others like Samuel Akinbo working with Yorùbá dùndún drummers (Akinbo 2019) have more success eliciting single words.
Only once the productive rules are worked out through elicitation would I recommend tackling the fixed repertoire. You’ll be armed with the musicians’ metalinguistic knowledge of the system and use that to determine how close of a match the rote material is to its spoken translation.
References
Akinbo, Samuel. 2019. Representation of Yorùbá tones by a talking drum: An acoustic analysis. Langues et Linguistique Africaine.
Churma, Donald. 1979. Arguments from external evidence in phonology. PhD dissertation, Ohio State University.
McPherson, Laura. 2018. The talking balafon of the Sambla: Grammatical principles and documentary implications. Anthropological Linguistics 60.3: 255-294.
McPherson, Laura and Lucas James. Ms. Artistic adaptation of Seenku tone: Musical surrogates vs. vocal music. Submitted to Selected Proceedings of ACAL50.
Strand, Julie. 2009. The Sambla xylophone: Tradition and identity in Burkina Faso. PhD dissertation, Wesleyan University.