Comparative dialect survey in the Kulango-Loron

Comparative dialect survey in the Kulango-Loron

is the title of research project hosted by the Lehrstuhl Afrikanistik 1. The project is financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Kulango and Loron are closely related Gur languages, belonging to a dialect continuum that has not yet sufficiently been studied. The centre of this dialect continuum lies in Ivory Coast and extends into southern Burkina Faso and Ghana. The project has the following aims:

1) to give an overview of the distribution of individual Kulango-Loron variants;
2) to obtain clarity with respect to their linguistic features;
3) to research present (and past) language contact and their effects on the individual language systems

From a methodological point of view, the research integrates dialectology and historical-comparative linguistics. This should approach establish and describe language contact phenomena on the one hand, and clarify the classification of the Kulango-Loron group on the other hand.