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3 Methodology
3.1 Choice of test sites
Tasawaq is spoken only in Ingal and Teguidda-n-Tessoumt. The Bernuses 1972 indicate that most of the inhabitants of Teguidda-n-Tessoumt are just there seasonally to work the salt pans
and have their permanent residences in Ingal. So, we went to Ingal.
Since we wanted our samples of Tagdal and Tabarog to be as pure as possible, we looked for villages which were inhabited only by Igdalen or Iberogan, but not both. Ideally, we would have
chosen villages which were not on a main road limiting their contact with other speech forms and which had primary schools for ease of test administration. However, we were constrained
by the insecurity of the region between Abalak and Agadez to choose a village on the main road for our Tagdal sample. Tamaya was suggested to us by the Sub-Prefect of Abalak, and we had
the good fortune to meet the village chief the following day in Abalak. A primary school was established there four years ago. The Igdalen chief, in turn, recommended Tofabayogh to us as
an Iberogan village. Its relatively isolated location should ensure a stable linguistic community. There is no public school in any Iberogan village.
3.2 Choice of translators
Since no team members spoke any of the dialects in question, we had to rely on translators in order to accomplish this study. There are many young men in Ingal who have completed at least
a primary education, so we had no trouble finding native Tasawaq speakers to translate from French for us. The chef de poste assigned one young man from his staff to help us during our
stay, and other local men were available when we needed them.
The very conservative Igdalen and Iberogan, however, have resisted sending any of their children to public schools until very recently, so very few of them speak French. The
Representative of the Chief of the 7th Group of Tamajaq Peoples in Abalak was able to call upon Alassane Ntinicar, a young approximately 25 years old, black Agdal Kel Amdit who had
grown up in Agadez and had completed three years of middle school. He and his younger cousin, Abdoulaye Islamane, translated for us in Tamaya and Tofabayogh. We can’t be sure whether
their youth or their race influenced the data we collected. We did observe that, between themselves, they spoke more Hausa than Tagdal. Christiansen’s knowledge of Tadaksahak also
helped in the translation process.
3.3 Interview schedules
In each village we visited, we interviewed a group of people which was either called together by the chief or formed out of curiosity. In this way, we hoped that the answers and opinions
expressed would be the consensus of the group rather than the beliefs of just one person. In Ingal, the chief invited 5 men and 5 women, all more than 40 years old, to the interview. In
Tofabayogh, about 20 men, ranging in age from 16 years to more than 50, with the majority being around 30 years old, participated in the interview. In Tamaya, a group of men, aged
approximately 25-55 years, assembled around the village chief to answer our questions. The size of the group varied between 6 and 15 during the course of our interview. The group interaction in
Tamaya was restrained, and after the first day, the chief forbade us to return to work there unless
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he was present. Whether this was because he felt we would find people uncooperative without his support or because he wanted to control what we heard, we cannot be sure.
We asked questions from both a general demographic and a general sociolinguistic interview schedule. The answers to the former told us about nearby schools, markets, and government
services; the latter dealt with perceived dialect differences, language attitudes, bilingualism and language use. The information gathered in this way provided a context for interpreting the results
of the dialect intelligibility testing, and furnished background information.
3.4 Word lists
Christiansen, who has been living among the Idaksahak and studying their language, Tadaksahak, since 1992, elicited a 380-item word list in each test site. The list is a combination
of the Swadesh 200-item list, the SIL Africa Area 200-item list, and the SIL Burkina Faso 270- item list. The glosses and data are presented in Appendix A.
3.5 Dialect intelligibility testing
3.5.1 The nominal method Dialect intelligibility testing Casad, 1974 essentially involves recording a 3 to 5 minute text in
each of the speech forms of interest and testing comprehension of the text among speakers of the other speech forms. It is used primarily to measure the degree of intelligibility between various
dialects inherent in their linguistic similarity. Below is a brief description of the steps in the preparation and administration of the test:
1. Two texts are elicited from a native speaker of Dialect A: one is a very short text used to “teach” the testing method and weed out unreliable subjects; the second is longer,
approximately 3 to 5 minutes in length. It should be autobiographical in nature and rich in details. It should also be as free as possible from objectionable or predictable subject
matter, proper nouns, and borrowed words. The longer text is transcribed and translated phrase-by-phrase into a language the test administrator understands.
2. A group of 15 or more basic comprehension questions in various semantic domains are developed based on the text and recorded. A test tape is made containing the text, in
segments, with the questions inserted just after the portion of the text containing the appropriate response. Thus, a subject’s performance will not depend on his ability to
remember the details of the text, but rather on his comprehension of the text.
3. Ten native speakers of Dialect A, preferably including both men and women, listen individually to the text and respond to the questions so that any badly composed or
misleading questions can be isolated and removed. Ten questions to which native speakers have responded with correct answers are chosen for the final form of the test.
These three steps are repeated at each test site to produce a test in each dialect.
4. Before administering the tests in Village B, the comprehension questions for all of the texts are recorded in Dialect B and inserted into their respective texts. Thus, Village B
test subjects will hear the texts in other dialects, but the questions in their own dialect,
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ensuring that their ability to respond is not impeded by a lack of comprehension of the questions themselves.
5. At least 10 native speakers of each target dialect, preferably including both men and women, are tested. They are screened against contact with the other dialects in question and
then listen individually to the shorter “learning text” and the longer text in their own dialect. If they are able to perform well, they then listen to the texts in the other dialects and
respond to the questions as they listen. They listen to each text only once, though they are allowed to listen to a section a second time if there was some distraction. Their responses
are written down and scored as “right”, “wrong”, or “half-right”. Their scores are interpreted as an indicator of the level of the inherent intelligibility of the other dialects.
A given speech form will be inherently intelligible to some degree to speakers of a related speech form simply because both forms have sprung from the same linguistic stock. As a property of the
language itself, the level of inherent intelligibility of a given dialect to speakers of a second dialect should be constant throughout the entire population of the latter. Thus, it is not necessary to obtain
a random sample to measure inherent intelligibility. Any ten speakers who have mastered their own dialect will suffice. Certain individuals, however, will normally have had contact with
speakers of other dialects, and thus, will have learned to understand them better. This “learned intelligibility” could be considered a type of bilingualism, a related but separate phenomenon
which naturally varies within a population. Test subjects are screened to eliminate those which have had much contact with the other dialects in question.
3.5.2 Deviations in this study Christiansen recorded and transcribed a Tadaksahak text in Menaka as described in Step 1 above;
however, circumstances beyond his control prevented him from completing the hometown validation of comprehension questions Step 3 above before we used the Tadaksahak test in
Niger. We compensated for this by having all test subjects attempt to answer all 16 comprehension questions which Christiansen devised for the Tadaksahak text. Then, after we
were able to return to Menaka and play the test for native Tadaksahak speakers, we knew which questions to discount and what range of answers to consider acceptable in scoring the
Tadaksahak test.
While playing the Tadaksahak test for native speakers in Menaka, one person commented that the person asking the questions spoke better Tadaksahak than the person recounting the story.
This could throw a shadow of doubt on the validity of the Tadaksahak test; however, all ten Idaksahak who listened to the test were able to answer 10 of the questions without any trouble,
so we believe that the test is valid.
In all groups, but especially among the Igdalen and Iberogan, we were met by village leaders who were cautious of outsiders. In Tamaya, we were denied permission to speak with Igdalen
women. The chief pointed out that no women were even visible in the village. On the last day of the survey, however, we did get to interview a young black woman there. The chief of
Tofabayogh informed us that all of the women of his village were afraid to speak with us. We
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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
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