UC San Diego

This dissertation is a comprehensive grammar of Northern Toussian, a minority language spoken in southwest Burkina Faso of uncertain genetic heritage within Niger Congo (potentially Gur/Mabia). The grammar details various aspects of the language, including its phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse, and situates its features typologically, noting structural similarities with neighboring languages of the region.This was produced as part of a broader, long-term documentation project conducted since 2018 for which additional audio and video recordings, lexical data, and cultural information were collected. In addition to the properties of the language discussed throughout most of this grammar, this dissertation touches on some of these cultural phenomena. Most notably among them is the Northern Toussian musical surrogate language, a way of encoding speech with a type of resonating gourd xylophone called a balafon. The way this encoding functions and what it reveals about the linguistic structure of the language is described in this dissertation. Many texts were collected while documenting the language, reflecting a diverse set of genres, including stories, histories, songs and interviews. Textual data are used extensively to demonstrate grammatical phenomena, and a portion of these texts is provided in the grammar.