Alexandra Vydrina (2 July 1988 – 16 September 2021) was a Russian linguist and researcher at the
French National Centre for Scientific Research
The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe.
In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 engi ...
(Paris) specializing in research on African
languages of Guinea
The Republic of Guinea is a multilingual country, with over 40 languages spoken. The official language is French.
Several indigenous languages have been given the status of national languages: Fula (or Pular); Malinké (or Maninka); Susu; ...
.
In West Africa, she was known as Sogolon Condé.
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Life and contributions
Vydrina received her education at St. Petersburg State University and in 2008 started working on the Kakabe language of Guinea, a Mande language
The Mande languages are a family of languages spoken in several countries in West Africa by the Mandé peoples. They include Maninka (Malinke), Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Kpelle, Jula (Dioula), Bozo, Mende, Susu, and Vai. There are aro ...
spoken in the Fouta Djallon
Fouta Djallon (, , ; ) is a Highland (geography), highland region in the center of Guinea, roughly corresponding with Middle Guinea, in West Africa.
Etymology
The Fulani people call the region Fouta Jallon Kingdom, Fuuta-Jaloo ( ) in the Pular l ...
highland region. She was a doctoral student at INALCO
Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (; ), abbreviated as INALCO, is a French Grand Etablissement with a specializing in the teaching of languages and cultures from the world. Its coverage spans languages of Central Europ ...
(Paris), and had postdoctoral positions in the CNRS
The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe.
In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...
and at the Higher School of Economics
HSE University (), officially the National Research University Higher School of Economics () is a public research university founded in 1992 and headquartered in Moscow, Russia. Along with its main campus located in the capital, the university ...
(Moscow).
She completed a dictionary of Kakabe in 2015, and a comprehensive grammatical description in 2017.[Vydrina (2017)] She also contributed to general questions of the interaction of tone and intonation with information structure
In linguistics, information structure, also called information packaging, describes the way in which information is Formal semantics (natural language), formally packaged within a Sentence (linguistics), sentence.Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. ''Informati ...
, of modality, and of small-scale multilingualism from the perspective of her research on the Kakabe language.
Works
Major works on Kakabe
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* Available in open access: https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01801759
Further research articles
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Secondary sources
* Guillemain, Franck. 2019. ''Sasha Vydrina, la langue kakabé en Guinée''. Documentary film. 17 minutes. https://www.canal-u.tv/video/cnrs_ups2259/sasha_vydrina_la_langue_kakabe_en_guinee.50573
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Notes
External links
Page at CNRS-LACITOPage at Laboratoire de Phonétique et PhonologiePage at Google Scholar
{{DEFAULTSORT:Vydrina, Alexandra
1988 births
2021 deaths
People from Leningrad Oblast
Linguists from Russia
Linguists of Mande languages
Russian Africanists
21st-century linguists
Saint Petersburg State University alumni
French National Centre for Scientific Research scientists
Russian women linguists