Alexandra Vydrina

Alexandra Vydrina was a Russian linguist and researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research specializing in research on African languages of Guinea. In West Africa, she was known as Sogolon Condé.

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 spoken in the Fouta Djallon highland region. She was a doctoral student at INALCO, and had postdoctoral positions in the CNRS and at the Higher School of Economics.
She completed a dictionary of Kakabe in 2015, and a comprehensive grammatical description in 2017. She also contributed to general questions of the interaction of tone and intonation with information structure, of modality, and of small-scale multilingualism from the perspective of her research on the Kakabe language.

Works

Major works on Kakabe

Available in open access: https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01801759
Further research articles

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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