Dyula is a language of the Mande language family spoken mainly in Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Mali, and also in some other countries, including Ghana, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau. It is one of the Manding languages and is most closely related to Bambara, being mutually intelligible with Bambara as well as Malinke. It is a trade language in West Africa and is spoken by millions of people, either as a first or second language. Similar to the other Mande languages, it uses tones. It may be written in the Latin, Arabic or N'Ko scripts.
The Songhay, Songhai or Ayneha languages are a group of closely related languages/dialects centred on the middle stretches of the Niger River in the West African countries of Mali, Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso and Nigeria. In particular, they are spoken in the cities of Timbuktu, Djenné, Niamey and Gao. They have been widely used as a lingua franca in that region ever since the era of the Songhai Empire. In Mali, the government has officially adopted the dialect of Gao as the dialect to be used as a medium of primary education.
Paul Jules Antoine Meillet was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century. He began his studies at the Sorbonne University, where he was influenced by Michel Bréal, Ferdinand de Saussure and the members of the L'Année Sociologique. In 1890, he was part of a research trip to the Caucasus, where he studied the Armenian language. After his return, de Saussure had gone back to Geneva so he continued the series of lectures on comparative linguistics that the Swiss linguist had given.
André Martinet was a French linguist, influential due to his work on structural linguistics.
Théophile Obenga is professor emeritus in the Africana Studies Center at San Francisco State University. He is a politically active proponent of Pan-Africanism and an Afrocentrist. Obenga is an Egyptologist, linguist, and historian.
Henri Wittmann is a Canadian linguist from Quebec. He is best known for his work on Quebec French.
Mathieu Guidere is a full professor at the University of Paris and research director at the French National Institute of Health (INSERM). A scholar of Linguistics and Translation studies, he has held other professorships at prestigious institutions including the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Dr. Guidere is also the founder of the Swiss Non-governmental organization (NGO) Multilingual International Mediators (MIM), and has been awarded a Fulbright Prize to advance his research on the psychology of terrorism. He has been also editor-in-chief of the French Journal of Languages' Professors, Les Langues Modernes. In 2015, he was also Team Leader of the European Union CVE Program in the Sub-Saharan Region. In 2017, he was also the UNOWAS Senior Expert in West Africa and the Sahel Region for countering violent extremism.
Métis French, along with Michif and Bungi, is one of the traditional languages of the Métis people, and the French-dialect source of Michif.
Dangaléat is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in central Chad. Speakers make up the majority of the population of Migami Canton in Mongo, Chad.
Marcel Samuel Raphaël Cohen was a French linguist. He was an important scholar of Semitic languages and especially of Ethiopian languages. He studied the French language and contributed much to general linguistics.
Robert Nicolaï is a French linguist specializing in the Songhay languages, professor at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis.
Jean-Claude Milner is a linguist, philosopher and essayist. His specialist fields of endeavour are linguistics and psychoanalysis. In 1971, Milner was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he translated Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax into French. His work helped to establish the terminology of theory of syntax in the French school of generative grammar. Milner is now a professor at the University Paris Diderot and lives in Paris.
Georges-Jean Pinault is a French linguist who is professor of linguistics at the École pratique des hautes études. He is one of the leading experts on Tocharian languages and has published more than two hundred articles on Indo-European linguistics. He is one of the editors of the journal Tocharian and Indo-European Studies.
Lehar or Laalaa is one of the Cangin languages spoken in Senegal in the Laa Region, north of Thies as well as the Tambacounda area. The speakers are ethnically Serers, however just like the Ndut, Palor, Saafi and Noon languages, they are closely related to each other than to the Serer-Sine language. The Lehar language which is closer to Noon, is part of the Niger–Congo family. The number of speakers based on 2002 figures were 10,925.
France Martineau is a professor and a Canadian linguist. Martineau is an expert in Canadian French linguistics and considered a leader in historical sociolinguistics as well as a pioneer in the digital humanities. Martineau presently holds the University of Ottawa Research Chair Le français en mouvement: Frontières, réseaux et contacts en Amérique française.
Michel Ferlus is a French linguist whose special study is in the historical phonology of languages of Southeast Asia. In addition to phonological systems, he also studies writing systems, in particular the evolution of Indic scripts in Southeast Asia.
Mitsou Ronat was a French poet, linguist and specialist of literary theory.
Panchronic phonology is an approach to historical phonology. Its aim is to formulate generalizations about sound changes that are independent of any particular language or language group.
Albert Dauzat was a French linguist specializing in toponymy and onomastics.
Christiane Marchello-Nizia is a French linguist who specializes in the history of the French language. She was professor at the École normale supérieure de Lyon and Director of the Institute for French Linguistics until her retirement in 2006.
