Unfortunately though, annotated and translated books that fully mark discourse features are neither the best medium for a post-facto audience nor do they give researchers access to the open-source data that would allow them to perform analyses on things like "sentence-initial tonal bounce".
Read moreWhat languages do West Africans speak?
A recent Afrobarometer working paper states that less than 2% of Africans identify English, French of Portuguese as the language they speak at home. What languages do they speak?
Read moreThe expression "Pin ni pan" in Bambara and Maninka
With the expression pín' ní pán' it seems that we have a similar case where words featuring the expressive element of /p/ are used idiomatically to refer to denotationally unspecified actions associated with effort. The closest parallel that comes to mind in English is an expression like "blah-blah-blah" though it isn't grammaticalized in the same way or to the same extent.
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