Sahouè 101

Arriving in Benin with a few years of French learning under my belt has helped me mightily in training, meetings, and visits to the capital city of Cotonou. At site, however, it’s a different story. Benin has French as its official language, but it’s usually reserved for government, media, education, and formal business. All other communication needs are met by local languages, of which there are more than 50 throughout a country that’s about the size of Pennsylvania. The most predominant language is Fon, which is spoken throughout the southern half of the country and in urban centers. At my site, people mainly speak Sahouè (pronounced Sah-HWAY, descending tone), the primary language of at least 200,000 Beninese and a linguistic relative to Fon.

The first thing to know about Sahouè is the essential nature of greetings. You could translate and recite Macbeth to a Sahouè speaker, take your bow, and the first thing they would say is “Great, Billy the Bard, but why didn’t you greet me?” Greetings are recognitions and check-ins, a chance to touch base even if the back and forth is as original as writing blogs as a Peace Corps Volunteer. From “How’d you wake up?” (NadƐ mi fɔn do?) to “Are you well?” (Mi lƐ kédé?), the proof of caring is in the asking. My favorite greetings are “Have a nice sit” (Kudo oyi hlɔnno) and “Did you do a little today?” (Mi wasi vilƐ?). The latter comes from the agrarian tradition of the daily grind of field work. You can’t sow, reap, and harvest at once, so “Did you do a little today?”

My language tutor and I exchange greetings, 

and he asks me where I traveled recently (Cotonou).

Treading into the waters of socio-linguistics, Sahouè and many other Gbe languages differentiate between the first and second person plural only through tonal inflection. That is, the difference between “we” and “y’all” is saying Mi (which sounds like “Me”) like you would a statement (descending tone) versus a question (ascending tone). This weak distinction between grammatical subjects is very interesting. It may attest to widespread West African cultural norms that enforce collectivism, sharing, and the usage of family monikers like papa, mama, brother, and sister among non-biological kin. For example, sharing meals among the Sahouè is not only common place, but a social expectation if someone encounters another eating. Likewise, “Papa” and “Mama” are preferred over “Mister” and “Madam” to show respect and draw people closer together. Now, there are cultures like this without the linguistic connection, and whether linguistic chickens come before cultural eggs remains debatable. My tutor and I nonetheless think there’s at least some truth to the connection. 

While my work counterpart does most of the presenting in Fon,

I can sometimes add clarifications or lighten the mood with a little Sahouè.

One thing I know for certain, though, is the Mi’s impact on my having comprehensible conversations. Tones, man. Tones. The difference between Mi (ascending) and Mi (descending) is often indistinguishable. What’s more, the “y’all” mi is also the formal “you.” The real kicker, though, is when all this is mixed with the fact that there’s no grammatical structure in Sahouè for asking yes/no questions. In English, we have helpful structures like “Did [subject + verb + object]?” or starting the question with “is” (e.g. “Is he really writing at length about this?”). The closest thing to asking a yes/no question in Sahouè is elevating your pitch because you can’t elevate the final tone like you would in English or French. Not with a tonal language. The other coping technique is conversational: If someone states something that may actually be a question, you respond to it with an answer that may actually be just another statement. Conversations result in something like the following, a true exchange. I omit question marks for realism:

Neighbor: Mi fɔn kédé. (You awoke well.)

Me: Ko fɔn kédé. Mi fɔn kédé. (I awoke well. You awoke well.)

Neighbor: Mi fɔn kédé. Mi lƐ kédé. (We awoke well. You are well.)

Me: Ko lƐ kédé. (I am well.)

Neighbor: Animateurs, yƐ gbɔn. (Coworkers, they arrived.)

Me: Eo, yƐ ɔn gbɔn. (No, they haven’t arrived.)

Neighbor: Mi ɔn kpɔein. (You haven’t seen them.)

Me: Ko ɔn kpɔein. (I haven’t seen them.)

Neighbor: YƐ gbɔn. (They arrived.)

Me: Eo! (No!)

Neighbor: Vo ko kpɔein. (But I saw them.)

Me: Huh?! YƐ gbɔn. (They arrived.)

Neighbor: Eeh, yƐ gbɔn lƐ suwƐ. (Yes, they arrived yesterday.)

Me: [sigh] Aha! Ko sƐ. (I understand.)

Abbott and Costello would sure have a good time. Notice how early in the conversation yƐ gbɔn was presumed to be a question when it was in fact a statement. It ends up being said three times by my neighbor. My tutor advised me to use this technique, thus turning yes/no questions into several lines of dialogue in perhaps a clever ploy to get me to speak more Sahouè. Figuring out what people are saying in these cases just requires careful attention and due diligence. You could probably say the same thing for all my interactions in Sahouè, but that would underestimate just how much goes over my head. 

Diligence is the last lesson here, after the helpfulness of dialogue, the philosophical closeness of “we” and “you,” and that there’s nothing more foundational than recognition. All these lessons, all thanks to Sahouè. It has been a slow and frustrating learning process, but hey: Learning to speak another language is difficult, but sometimes it’s the only way we can learn to listen.