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My five-year process to learn Nanerige

Phil Bergen

After a very long time of working towards the goal of learning the Nanerige language, I am able to converse as long as the subject matter is simple, day-to-day stuff and people don’t talk too fast.

A few weeks ago, a friend and I talked for about 10 minutes before I realized that we weren’t using any Jula, the local trade language. We were speaking Nanerige. It was like a tremendous weight had been lifted, and life started flowing freely again. I was so overcome with relief that after my friend left, I had to lie down.

Then, while we were at a grammar workshop in Ouagadougou a few weeks ago, I passed the language test that SIL gives in order to do translation work. Now I was ready to work.

We arrived in Burkina Faso in September 1990 and, except for two furloughs, have been here ever since. We took over the translation work of an evangelist couple, freeing them for further language study.


Our goal is to share the gospel with the Nanerige people in their own language. I started learning Nanerige by tackling the tone first. Having already learned Jula, another tonal language, I understood the importance of hitting the hardest part first. To do this, I tried to memorize long lists of words tonally correct. This did very little for my fluency, and I made no progress at forming new sentences, but it did teach my ears to hear the music of Nanerige.

In Nanerige, when words are put together to make sentences, the tone of each word changes because it is affected by other words in the sentence. Getting a feel for these changes is the hardest part of the task. Trying to do it without getting a sense of the underlying tones of the words before they are put together into sentences would have been overwhelming.

After working on tone, I decided to learn to speak this language by creating a situation in which a native speaker could talk to me at length on a lot of different subjects, and I would “just pick up” the language the way children do.

I constructed a model village, complete with people, animals and objects. I started by moving the objects around, instructing my language helper to “tell me what is going on as it happens”. It didn’t take me long to understand what he was saying. Then I told him to say something and I would move the objects to match what he was saying. After a while, I gave him scenarios in French, and I watched how the scenario played itself out in Nanerige.

I gathered oral texts like this on cassette and listened to them over and over. I put little emphasis on actually speaking the language until the last few months here. Language-learning people call this time of listening with understanding before you can actually speak much of the language the “silent period”.

After working like this for about three years (I had spent two years memorizing words and phrases first), the breakthrough came. I could understand what people were saying in certain contexts and then put together sentences which they could understand.

I was getting a feel for Nanerige.

Now that I have the ability to speak simple Nanerige, I can take over the work of fellow missionary Dan Petersen. He and Maliki, our Nanerige translator, have played the cassettes of the Scriptures that have been translated – covering the main points from Genesis through Pentecost – for the elders in Maliki’s home village. The Petersens did not finish playing the tapes for the elders of N’Dorola before leaving on furlough.

There was enthusiasm expressed for hearing more of the Word of God. In Maliki’s village, nine of the elders who heard the tapes accepted the message. In

N’Dorola, we are free to “teach” the Scriptures, having received permission from the elders even though they have not heard the whole message yet.

This is a culture where print is not used. As the gospel is shared here and a church is born, it will be done by word of mouth. I am often amazed at how well people in an oral culture process and retain what they hear.

For example, this is a written representation of a sentence I recently heard spoken by a four-year-old boy to his parents: “Uh uh ah ahah uh ahah.” The sentence is nothing but syllables, but what is important is the tone, the music of the language. Thus, his parents understood him.

Having an incorrect tone in Nanerige is like removing all the vowels in English – people just stare at you. Consider this sentence: “Bbbs bnm nglshclss.” Now consider the tone: “Boobe ees i bay on moy unglush cluss.” What I’m really saying is “Bobby is a boy in my English class.”

In February, I will begin explaining the meaning of additional Scriptures for Maliki so that he can translate them into Nanerige. Our goal is to translate Scriptures needed to teach new believers about how to actually follow “The Way”. We’ll start in the book of Acts, and I’m not sure where we’ll end up yet.

Phil and Carol Bergen are missionaries under Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission, jointly supported by MBMS International and Commission on Overseas Mission of the General Conference Mennonite Church. They have two children, John-Mark and Maria. The Bergens are helping translate the gospel for the 65,000 unreached Nanerige people.

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Last modified December 19, 2005.

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