1 A LINGUIST'S FIELD NOTES INTRODUCTION ... - Llacan - CNRS

lighting up intensely trees, mud villages and men hurrying to take shelter from the
tornado that makes boubous flap violently.
Now the rain is beating hard on the car. We find Azare almost deserted with only a
few children hopping in the puddles formed by the hard driving rain. There’s no-one to
ask for direction. We go round and round under the heavy rain in this little town planted
around a cross-roads right in the middle of the plain.
We end up in a small hotel, the Central Hotel, where I rent a tiny room : toilet,
sagging bed, some arm-chairs, a little table, the whole thing sombre and not very clean.
I take my rest there while waiting for the storm to stop. An hour later, the storm has
ended. Drops of rain continue to fall on the town as a strong stench of humus rises from
the ground. The earth sprouts again and holds its shoots towards a trembling light of the
early morning sun. Here I am at last in Azare, in Bauchi State, to meet Emmanuel Ali,
a Zaar speaker and an English teacher in a Teachers’ Training College.
IN SEARCH OF EMMANUEL ALI
A year earlier, I had been recruited to participate in a project to draw the map of the
dialects of Hausa, a national language spoken over a wide area. The contacts I had made
over the years with my Hausa colleagues whose collaboration was indispensable to me
had made me doubt the feasibility of this study. Therefore, even before arriving in
Nigeria, I started looking for another project as an alternative to the Hausa project,
should it fail to take off. In fact, my Nigerian Hausaist colleagues, if they did not
abandon the university for journalism, senior administrative posts or the bank, spent all
their energy trying to survive from day to day in a continent that looks down on its
intellectuals. What strength would they have for linguistics?
I had therefore sought the opinion of Chadicist colleagues working in Europe or the
USA, asking them the question : On which Chadic language not yet described should
one work as a matter of priority in Nigeria? Without exception, everyone pointed to
Zaar, the language accounting for the greatest number of speakers among those that
constitute the West-B-III sub-branch of Chadic languages. In fact, there was very little
information about this group of languages, also called «Bauchi-South». This latter
name arises from the name of the part of the state where these languages are spoken. I
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