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got the impression that this hesitation was due to the women generally being guarded against contact with outsiders. Perhaps a female surveyor would be able to interview them.
After we had recorded the Tagdal text and questions in Tamaya, we were not able to seek out ten people to validate the test. Only three of the men who had come to the tree under which the chief
hosted us were willing to listen to the test, and at least one of them had been present when the story was recorded. All three of these fair-skinned men answered nearly all of the questions
correctly, but we could not consider that they formed a big enough or naive enough sample to validate the test questions. We had to continue validation of the Tagdal text questions with
Tagdal-speaking subjects as we found them, in Abalak, all black. Some of these referred to themselves as Iberogan, although our translator tried to assure us that this was due to the
common misconception among outsiders that all Igdalen are fair-skinned and all Iberogan are black. A number of our validators were from Abouraya, a village inhabited by both Igdalen and
Iberogan. Thus, it is possible that questions which might have distinguished between Tagdal and Taberog were excluded from the test.
When we returned to Tamaya to administer the test, we had the good fortune of drawing the interest of five 15 to 16 year-old students who were on their lunch break and who became willing
and capable test subjects. About half of these were black, and since the Igdalen tend to pay close attention to race, once again we cannot be sure our testing did not obscure any differences in
intelligibility that may exist between the Tagdal- and Tabarog-speaking groups. We were able to develop a valid test in Tofabayogh, but every time we went to this village it rained in the evening.
The Iberogan are subsistence farmers rather than nomadic pastoralists as we had expected, so, of course, the day following a good rainfall, every able-bodied person among them went out to his
fields to plant millet. We are glad that after two years of below-average rainfall, Niger has received abundant rains this year, but it meant that people were only available to work with us after
nightfall. We were also able to test some boys early in the morning before they were called away to other duties. Depending on the testing conditions and how well a subject catches onto the method,
it can take from 40 to 60 minutes to administer the test in four dialects. After spending two nights in the village, we had completed testing with only seven subjects, but we judged this was as good
as we were going to be able to do, and we didn’t want to wear out our welcome.
4 Results
4.1 Dialect intelligibility testing
The Northern Songhay texts used in this study are shown in interlinearized form in Appendix B along with their related comprehension questions.
The results of our Northern Songhay dialect intelligibility testing are summarized in Table 1 below. The columns correspond to the village test sites, and the rows correspond to the texts in
each speech form. Demographic information on all subjects and individual test scores are tabulated in Appendix C. Means, standard deviations, and sample sizes are tabulated in
Appendix D.
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Table 1 Summary of results of the Northern Songhay Recorded Text Test Mean Scores Test Site: -
Speech form Ingal
Tasawaq Tofabayogh
Tabarog Tamaya
Tagdal
Tasawaq
94 73
62
Tabarog
40 93
93
Tagdal 49
88 89
Tadaksahak
25 54
50
In Ingal, the subjects averaged 94 on the Tasawaq text, showing that they understand their own form of speech very well, of course. However, they scored only 40 and 49 on the Tabarog
and Tagdal texts respectively, indicating insufficient intelligibility of these speech forms to suggest they could easily use Tabarog or Tagdal literature. Their comprehension of the
Tadaksahak text was even lower at 25.
For the seven subjects we were able to test in Tofabayogh, the Wilcoxon t-test shows no significant difference between their scores on their hometown text Tabarog and the Tagdal text.
The Iberogan and the Igdalen seem to live in such close contact that it may not be possible to find a significant number of Iberogan men who do not have regular contact with Igdalen men.
We certainly weren’t able to work with any during our brief visits to Tofabayogh. Two of our test subjects identified the Igdalen story-teller by name This means that it was practically
impossible for us to measure the inherent intelligibility of Tagdal to Iberogan men because they could be considered bilingual in Tagdal. Perhaps there are Iberogan women who do not have
contact with Tagdal speakers, but no women were willing to talk with us. Our best attempt for the moment is to consider only the scores of our four youngest Iberogan subjects, who were
between 10 and 16 years old. It may be that they have not had extensive contact with Igdalen simply because of their youth. Their mean score, however, is also 88. Thus, Tagdal appears to
be inherently intelligible to the Iberogan.
1
The Iberogan subjects averaged only 73 on the Tasawaq test, which is too low to suggest that they could profit from development of the
Tasawaq language. Their average score of 54 on the Tadaksahak test shows clearly that this language is not inherently intelligible to them.
In Tamaya, once again, there is no statistically significant difference between our nine subjects’ scores on their hometown test Tagdal and the Tabarog test. It appears that Tagdal and Tabarog
are mutually intelligible. The Igdalen appear to understand less Tasawaq 62 than the
1
Several difficulties in preparing and administering the Tagdal and Tabarog tests see section 3.5.2 may have masked any difference in intelligibility between these two populations; however the Igdalen and Iberogan claim to
have the same language, and we have not been able to show any lack of comprehension between them.
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Iberogan. Their score of 50 on the Tadaksahak test shows unequivocally that Tadaksahak is not inherently intelligible to them.
4.2 Adaptation potential
