Dogon personal pronouns: reconstruction and internal phylogeny

Abstract This paper provides a reconstruction of the personal pronouns of the Dogon language family of central Mali. We expose, juxtapose and contrast the available synchronic evidence from 19 Dogon languages in order to establish etyma inherited from the presumed proto-language: Proto-Dogon (PD). We present sound correspondences and morphological change between Proto-Dogon and the daughter languages, demonstrating that clear proto-forms can be established for 1 sg , 2 sg and 3 sg pronouns, and to a lesser degree, plural pronouns, which show greater internal variation. Furthermore, internal reconstruction demonstrates that the ‘independent’, ‘possessive’ and ‘subject-affixal’ uses of the pronouns have evolved from a single set of shared inherited morphemes. Evidence from the reconstruction of the Proto-Dogon pronominal paradigm weights favourably into the genetic cohesion of the Dogon languages and provides strong systematic evidence for the internal phylogenetic classification of these languages.