Language Practices in the Dahiras

This chapter elaborates on the language practices observable during and after the dahira sessions. It starts by explicating the Mouride transmigration pattern, by arguing that the diasporans’ movement throughout the world is not just a mere shuttle between Senegal and receiving countries, but is part of a larger, more complex transnational connectivity, rendered possible by the transmigrants’ fluid movement between nations. The chapter then homes in on the fact that this mobility is not just a physical movement. Movement, of people and of goods, can also be occasioned through the medium of digital and social networking platforms which serve to collapse the timespace continuum into the here and now, as dahira members who are present as well as members in various other countries can participate in the sessions. Movement is also typified mentally and linguistically through intertextual mentions of (past) lived experiences that speakers may invoke into the present moment as part of a chronotopic situation at hand, and through the replication of the Touba model in the spaces they create, thereby making there here, and then now.