Bangime (ISO 639-3: dba) is a language isolate spoken in the otherwise Dogon-inhabited Bandiagara Escarpment in central-eastern Mali. Bangime data come from elicitation sessions and text collection gathered during our fieldwork in Mali from 2008-2010 and in Burkina Faso from 2011-2013 and the summer of 2023. Bangime word order depends on the TAM of the clause. Here, we concentrate on perfective-imperfective word order distinctions. The perfective aspect is object-final whereas the imperfective is verb-final. Pronouns and ‘agreement’ markers precede verbs and tense/aspect/mood ‘auxiliaries’. We use the terms ‘agreement’ and ‘auxiliary’ tentatively as these markers from part of our ongoing analysis of the language’s morpho-syntax. Examples illustrating these properties of the language are given in (1)-(2). (1) Perfective aspect S V O ɲ́=ɥàà bḭ̄ḭ̀ 3S buy.PFV goat ’He bought a goat.’ (2) Imperfective aspect S AUX O V ń=dà bḭ̄ḭ̀ ŋ̄=ɥáá 3S IPFV goat LINK buy ’He is buying a goat.’ In Bangime, a subject may be expressed by a NP or a pronoun. The third person pronoun, as shown in (1)-(2) is a homorganic nasal that occurs in clause-initial position. This nasal reappears in (2) preceding the verb and appears to agree with the subject. The simple perfective as shown in (1) is unmarked save for tone on the verb and SVO word order. The imperfective is expressed by an imperfective marker that agrees with the subject in its tonal marking. The imperfective aspect further differs from the perfective in that the object precedes the verb. The aspect-conditioned word order in Bangime is, to our knowledge, unique in the zone in which Bangime is spoken. Strikingly similar patterns are found in Kwa languages spoken along the coast of the horn of West Africa in Benin. Examples (3)-(4) are drawn from Gungbe, cf. Aboh (2001: 194). However, a contact scenario between Bangime speakers and those of Gungbe would be difficult to imagine given the over 1,000 km journey separating them. (3) Perfective aspect S V O Àsíbá dín wé màlɔ́ Àsíbá tò wé màlɔ́ dín Asiba search.PFV book.SPF[+DEF] ‘Asiba even looked for a specific book.’ (4) Imperfective aspect S AUX O V Asiba IPFV book.SPF[+DEF] search.NR ‘Asiba is looking for a specific book.’ Examples (3)-(4) illustrate that the word orders in Gungbe are parallel to those in Bangime. Aboh (2001, 2004) presents this dichotomy as being a difference between imperfective and non-imperfective constructions in Gungbe. Additionally, Aboh (2001: 4) argues that a nominalization process, glossed by NR in (4), takes place in imperfective clauses. In addition to comparative published data from Kwa languages, we also show how our fieldwork data from Gur languages show that SOV predications can be nominal constructions where the direct object is assigned the genitive case. However, we show that Bangime does not reflect any syntactic asymmetries between SVO and SOV. We explore whether a reanalysis from noun- to verb-like SOV constructions could have happened in the language’s history and present and evaluate several possible diachronic scenarios of such a development. References Aboh, Enoch O. (2004). The Morphosyntax of Complement-Head Sequences: Clause Structure and Word Order Patterns in Kwa. Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax. New York: Oxford University Press. Aboh, Enoch O. (2001). Object Shift and Verb Movement in Gbe. Generative Grammar in Geneva 2, 1-13.