Why study musical surrogate languages? A linguist's perspective

Laura McPherson

Keywords: Africa, Balafon, Burkina Faso, Phonology, Tone, Linguistics, Sambla

It may seem like an unusual choice for a linguist to study musical instruments, as if we’re dallying uninvited with the territory of ethnomusicology. However, linguistics is the study of human language in all of its myriad forms, and I would argue that musical surrogate languages represent one of these forms. Now, it’s not a primary form like spoken or signed language. No child grows up with a musical surrogate language as their mother tongue, used for all day-to-day interactions. But musical surrogate languages are linguistically grounded in a way that other forms of non-verbal self-expression, like dance or dress, are not. In other words, we can learn a lot about spoken language through musical surrogate languages.

Here, I’ll offer an anecdote about how I stumbled into this area, in the hopes that it will encourage other linguists to more purposefully join the quest to better understand these systems.

It was 2013. I was in Burkina Faso on my first major field trip to document Seenku, a small Mande language spoken near Bobo-Dioulasso (by an ethnicity known to outsiders as the Sambla). By this time, I had been working in West Africa for five years, having recently wrapped up a project in neighboring Mali documenting Tommo So, a member of the Dogon language family. A lifelong lover of music, I had spent the last year analyzing Tommo So vocal music to understand what happened to the tones of the language when it was set to melody. Even in my early days working with Seenku, it was clear that its tone system was more complex than that of Tommo So, so I wondered what those tones would do when sung.

I asked my two main consultants, Clement and Emma, if they could bring me any recordings of Seenku songs. A couple days later, Clement gave me a folder of mp3s from a Sambla musician, Mamadou Diabate. That night, I greedily pored over the music, thrilled to hear what this language would sound like in song. To my great disappointment, the majority of the recordings were instrumental, a delicious but impenetrable tangle of xylophones (known in West Africa as balafons). I managed to find a couple of sung phrases and brought them up with Clement and Emma the next day to translate.

tɛ́nɛ́ gba̰̋ kú dɔ̏ɔ-nɛ̏-fi̋ɛ kənű mḭ̏ɛ̰, kʊ́ lɛ́ í bɛ̋ í wó bṵ́ɛ̰ɛ-kɛ̰̋ɛ̰
‘Whoever smells the odor of second day millet beer, he will say he worships the fetish.’

I thought I had wrapped up the work when Clement said enigmatically, “I know what the balafon is saying.”

Until that moment, the thought had never crossed my mind that an instrument could speak. Sure, I had heard the phrase “talking drums” before, but never given it much thought. Clement told me how everyone in the village could understand when the balafon spoke to them and offered a few translations from the song we were listening to (Ji Te So, from Mamadou Diabate’s album Keneya). And then I turned my attention back to pressing matters of conjugating verbs and figuring out phrasal tone, tucking the balafon conversation away for a rainy day.

That day came the following year, when a winter trip to Burkina Faso was postponed due to revolution. I was headed to Europe for a workshop and remembered that Mamadou Diabate lived in Vienna. On a whim, I reached out to him to see if I could pay him a visit and try to unravel some of the mysteries of how the balafon speaks. He agreed, and before I knew it, there we were in his studio. He was sitting behind his balafon, a huge instrument of wood and gourds, dressed in a crisp white shirt and black slacks, ready for a concert later. He told me that anything you could say with your mouth, you could say on the balafon. I offered a few phrases I’d been learning (things you would probably never actually say on the balafon, but you theoretically could).

“I will buy a goat.”
“I will buy goats.”

And there it was, that tonal difference that distinguishes Seenku singulars from plurals, it was clear as day in the notes of the balafon. A pitch difference, subtle in the human voice, rendered categorically distinct by the keys of the instrument. Mamadou explicitly pointed out that “goat”, bî, had two tones, and he enunciated them: bí. ȉ. Then he played them on the balafon. I had been grappling with the representation of this word, wondering whether that slight pitch fall I heard was just a phonetic effect or a true phonological feature of the word, a question Mamadou all but answered for me in the space of thirty seconds.

Since that visit in November of 2014, it has become increasingly clear how much we as linguists can learn from musical surrogate languages. They are the musical embodiment of what speakers know about their language, whether consciously or subconsciously. Used productively, they can provide a window onto underlying forms, as in the case of the Sambla balafon where postlexical tone processes aren’t encoded when a musician plays. In rote lyrics or proverbs, they can reveal archaic language or crystallized encodings that suggest earlier stages of the grammar. Rhythmic measurements can shed light on inner speech and how closely it matches verbal production, even though the oral articulators aren’t involved. And since every linguistic contrast isn’t encoded in surrogate speech, the choice of what is encoded allows us to explore questions of salience, functional load, or the balance between the need for communication and aesthetic principles.

Most research on surrogate languages has been carried out by ethnomusicologists or anthropologists, who produce fascinating work on the musical and cultural underpinnings of the systems. But linguists have been slow to the table, leaving many questions unanswered and many details unquestioned.

With most musical surrogate systems falling into disuse, time is of the essence. Just like the call to document endangered languages in the 1990s, this is my call for us to document endangered musical surrogate languages. Otherwise we’ll never know what they could have taught us about human communication.