Dioula

How a word for traders became a language

Jula was at first a label, not an ethnic name. It set Muslim traders apart from the farming population around them, mostly Senufo, and then passed to Manding-speaking traders and their speech. Over centuries some communities in towns such as Bobo-Dioulasso, Odienné and Kong took it as their own identity, and their varieties differ from the market Jula heard across Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire.

The market form grew from a simplified Bambara from Mali mixed with Maninka, and it became a lingua franca. Native Manding speakers in Côte d'Ivoire call it Tagbusikan, a slighting name. Migrant workers from the Sahel spread it further, and many Burkinabe learned it in Côte d'Ivoire and took it home.

How Burkina Faso made an alphabet official

A National Sub-Commission for Dioula was created on 15 July 1971, and its alphabet came out on 27 July 1973 and became official on 2 February 1979. Later changes added c and j for loanwords and replaced sh with s and ny with ɲ.

Each of the 28 letters stands for one sound; long vowels are written double, so ee stands for a long e, and a following n marks a nasal vowel. Tone marking was recommended in 1973 but is not practised, except in dictionaries and where a word would be ambiguous: a is the third person singular pronoun and á the second person plural.

Which other scripts carry it

Dioula can also be written in Arabic script and in N'Ko, the alphabet Solomana Kanté, a Guinean educator, devised in 1949 for the Manding languages. N'Ko is in Unicode, but with little funding and French holding official status, it is used mostly outside formal schooling and rarely on street signs.