Investigating the Relatedness of the Endangered Dogon Languages

Abstract

In this article we apply up-to-date methods of quantitative language comparison, inspired by algorithms successfully applied in bioinformatics to decode DNA and determine the genetic relatedness of humans, to language data in an attempt to shed light on the current situation of a family of languages called Dogon, which are spoken in Mali, West Africa. Our aim is to determine the linguistic subgroupings of these languages, which we believe will shed light on their prehistory, highlight the linguistic diversity of these groups and which may ultimately inform studies on the cultural boundaries of these languages.