Table 3.3 - Percentages of lexical similarity
Tanda
Dendi
93 Niki Beri
Zarma, Dosso
92 95
Bardouga
Zarmaganda
90 93
94 Goria
Zarma, W. Bank
89 92
93 96
Maloum Beri
Kurtey
89 92
93 93
91 Namarigoungou
Songhay, E. Bank
88 89
91 94
92 93
Dibilo
Songhay, Tera
87 87
89 94
92 90
93 Fantio
Songhay, Kaado
85 86
86 91
90 91
89 90
Sawani
Wogo
Joseph Grimes 1988 points out that while there is a correlation between low lexical similarity 60 and low intelligibility, high lexical similarity is not an accurate predictor of high inherent intelligibility.
The lowest percentage of lexical similarity that we measured was 85 between the speech of Tanda and the speech of Sawani. This simply confirms the need for the intelligibility testing which we
performed.
3.4 Dialect preference
We did not detect attitudes toward any of the dialects which would interfere with comprehension or acceptance of written materials. In fact, we found it interesting that often speakers confused names of
speech varieties as mentioned in Section 1.1. For example, in the village of Sawani, people alternately said they spoke Wogo, Zarma, or Songhay. People in Dibilo near Tera alternately referred
to their language as Songhay or Zarma.
When asking the question, “In which village is your language spoken the best?” the answers generally reflected a regional identity. For example, the people in Bardouga near Ouallam answered that Zarma
was spoken the best in the Zarmaganda. For the people in Fantio near Dolbel, the best Songhay is spoken in the Gorouol. Only in Goria did the people refer to a different region: Dosso.
The answers to the question, “If a foreigner wanted to learn your language, where is the best place to learn it?” reflected reasoning other than choosing the “purest” speech: in Fantio people said that a
foreigner should learn Songhay in their village as there are many educated and literate people in the village. In Goria, though they had said that the best Zarma was spoken in Dosso, they said that Goria
would be the best place for a foreigner to come and learn their language. Most of the other villages gave the response that any village would be suitable for learning the language. In Namarigoungou and
Tanda, however, the responses were more along the lines of purity of speech: the people in Namarigoungou on the east side of the river, responded that it would be better to learn Songhay on
the west side of the river; the people in Tanda said that they spoke pure Dendi, and therefore a foreigner should learn the language in their village.
In spite of fairly neutral responses to our questions, there appears to be some amount of identification of some groups with certain characteristics. We were told that often in comedy skits on the radio,
someone adopting the Dendi dialect would make people laugh. A speaker’s area of origin can be detected by various speech characteristics, but there do not seem to be very strong feelings about the
location of the “best” or “purest” Southern Songhay dialect in Niger.
3.5 Geographic differences
