The Fulɓe people are widely recognized as the foremost cattle specialists of West Africa. For centuries, their primary occupation has been cattle herding with a migratory tradition. Herding is not merely an economic activity but an essential characteristic of their cultural identity and heritage. Milk forms the basis of their staple diet, and their nomadic or seasonally semi-nomadic movements are guided by the search for optimal grazing land. Many of their celebrations and rituals involve cattle and/or cattle products.
Linguistic and anthropological studies indicate that cattle culture profoundly influences Fulɓe lifestyle, worldviews, dress styles, and even the grammar and lexicon of their native tongue known as Fulfulde (or Pulaar). One particular variety, known as Juguureere (or Djougoure, Juguure, see Glottocode djou1238) offers valuable insights into the rich grammatical features and extensive cattle-related vocabulary that characterize the language. Yet despite Juguureere’s potential to broaden our understanding of Fulfulde’s grammatical features and lexical elaboration reflecting cattle culture, this variety remains largely under-researched.
The study is situated in anthropological linguistics and adopts a semantic approach. The analysis is based on Juguureere data collected from Fulɓe Juguureeɓe herders in Kara region, northern Togo, and on my own intuitions as native speaker of the language.
Preliminary findings show that the cattle culture is reflected in the nominal classification system, whereby cows belong to a distinct noun class, while other animals are assigned to different noun classes based on various semantic features. The study also focuses on the lexical elaboration and on the rich semantics of cattle descriptive terms and their use to talk about concepts outside of the cattle domain.

• anthropological linguistics
• cattle

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