6 literacy program had to be shut down since everyone preferred the Malinké literacy
program run by Catholic priests. Their survey also addressed comprehension of and competence in Bambara.
They found that 66 of the Malinké in Bamako who profess to speak Bambara have not really mastered it. In addition, only a minority of women and villagers claim to
understand Bambara well. p. 153 Canut and Keïta concluded that Malinké needs to be used for the transmission
of important information and in functional literacy programs, especially in rural areas, where the use of Bambara only would be unsuited to development efforts “inadaptée
à un bon développement.” p. 154-155
B. DNAFLA and SIL
DNAFLA la Direction Nationale de l’Alphabétisation Fonctionelle et Linguistique Appliquée is a government agency in charge of the development of the
national languages of Mali. DNAFLA operates under the supervision of the Ministère de l’Education de Base. The Malian government welcomes the cooperation of Non-
Governmental Organizations NGOs in the development of national languages. SIL, the Société Internationale de Linguistique, is a non-profit, non-
governmental organization that conducts linguistic research in minority languages around the world. SIL often does literacy and post-literacy work in these languages
and tries to preserve their oral traditions. In addition, SIL translates literature of high moral value into these languages.
SIL began work in Mali in 1980 as a private organization. In 1986, SIL became a recognized NGO. SIL is committed to helping develop the languages of Mali and,
as a first step, a language survey is often required to assess the linguistic situation of a given language. This may result in finding that what was thought to be one
language is in fact, two or more separate languages. DNAFLA is not opposed to developing these, but its priorities are the designated national langueages. Since
the goals of both DNAFLA and SIL overlap in a number of areas, there is close collaboration between them. DNAFLA’s help and cooperation was essential both in
planning and carrying out this particular survey.
C. The Survey Team and Itinerary
The survey team for the first half of the survey consisted of Tim Tillinghast and Matthias Liebrecht, linguists from the Société Internationale de Linguistique SIL in
Bamako. Between September and December of 1995, trips were made to collect texts in the Bambara of Bamako, the Khassonké of Oussoubidiagna and the Malinké
of Badioula, Senegal. For the Bambara tests our interpreter was Dann Priebe, who grew up
speaking Bambara. The Bambara texts were transcribed with the aid of Jérémie Diarra.
The Khassonké test was made with the help of Jean Marie Kanouté, a native- tongue Khassonké speaker, and Harald Tveit, a Norwegian linguist working among
the Khassonké. For the Senegal leg of the survey, Kaly Konté of Tambacounda, Senegal
served as the main interpreter and translator. Brent and Debbie Mitchell, Canadians who work in the area, also provided help in linguistic matters and in the hometown
testing. Between December 1 to December 7, 1996, the survey team made a trip to
Kita, Mali to test the comprehension of the texts collected earlier. Testing was done
7 on Malinké speakers in the village of Dunba 7 km outside of Kita. A sociolinguistic
questionnaire was also administered. For the first two trips to Kita, Sory Diallo, trained and recommended by DNAFLA, was a part of the survey team. He served as
an interpreter and helped in transcription and translation of texts. On December 26 and 27, 1996, Tim Tillinghast did comprehension testing in
Kéniéba, Mali with the Kita, Khassonké and Senegal texts. A second trip was made to Kita by Tim Tillinghast and Sory Diallo on Feb. 29,
1996 to do testing in the village of Bendougou. They used a recorded text test in the Malinké of Kankan, Guinea that had been hometown-tested by Greg Pruett, a linguist
working in Guinea, but the results caused them to question whether the test was properly constructed.
It was decided that a new test was needed for Kankan, so in May 1996, Tim Tillinghast made a trip to Kankan, Guinea to collect a text in the Malinké Maninka of
Guinea. Hector Franklin and Jerry Page of SIM and Jibril Dounbaya, a native speaker of Maninka, helped out with this.
On May 30, 1996, this text was tested on speakers in Karaya Tumuba, a Malinké village 17 km northeast of Kita. Mamadou Diabaté of Kita acted as the
interpretertranslator.
V.
Methods and Strategies
A. Recorded Text Tests
