ABSTRACT
Scholars studying western Africa are challenged by conundrums involving relationships between languages, social groupings, and cultures. People in western Africa define themselves principally according to kinship and occupational affiliations and only secondarily in linguistic terms. Language is the principal vehicle for communicating social and cultural attributes, and the language an individual speaks may be considered a "primary" identity. The inhabitants of western Africa speak languages classified as subfamilies of Niger-Kordofanian: Mande, Kruan, and Gur. Linguists divide West Atlantic languages into two branches, Northern and Southern, the line of demarcation extending approximately along the border of Guinea-Bissau and Guinea-Conakry, where the western outliers of Futa Jallon most closely approach the Atlantic seaboard. A salient characteristic of West Atlantic languages is that despite great divergences in vocabulary, they are strikingly similar in their systems of sound, grammar, and semantics. The origins of landlord-stranger reciprocities are lost in antiquity, but their tenets are embedded in the fundaments of the societies of western Africa.
