Dahalo language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Dahalo | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Kenya | |
| Region: | Coast Province | |
| Total speakers: | 400 | |
| Language family: | Afro-Asiatic Cushitic South Cushitic Dahalo |
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | cus | |
| ISO/FDIS 639-3: | dal | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Dahalo is an endangered South Cushitic language spoken by about 400 people in Kenya.
It is largely spoken in the area of the Tana River. Many, if not all, of its speakers are bilingual, their other language being Swahili.
It is distinguished by the use of clicks as phonemes. It is suspected that the Dahalo may have once spoken a Sandawe-like language, and that they retained clicks in some words when they shifted to a Cushitic language. If so, the clicks represent a substratum.
Contents |
[edit] Sounds
[edit] Consonants
Dahalo has 62 consonants:
| Labial | Dental/Alveolar | Post- alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | Epiglottal | Glottal | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| dental | alveolar | labial | plain | labial | ||||||||
| Stop | plain | voiceless | p | t̪ | t̠ | k | kʷ | ʡ | ʔ | |||
| voiced | b | d̪ | d̠ | ɡ | ɡʷ | |||||||
| pre- nasalized |
voiceless | mp | ⁿt̪ | ⁿt̠ | ŋk | ŋkʷ | ||||||
| voiced | mb | ⁿd̪ | ⁿd̠ | ⁿd̠ʷ | ŋg | ŋgʷ | ||||||
| nasal | m | n | ɲ | |||||||||
| ejective | p’ | t̪’ | t̠’ | k’ | k’ʷ | |||||||
| implosive | ɓ | ɗ | ||||||||||
| Affricate | plain | voiceless | ʦ | ʧ | ||||||||
| voiced | ʣ | ʣʷ | ʤ | |||||||||
| pre- nasalized |
voiceless | ⁿʦ | ⁿʧ | |||||||||
| voiced | ⁿʣ | ⁿʤ | ||||||||||
| nasalized click |
voiceless | ŋ̊| | ŋ̊|ʷ | |||||||||
| voiced | ŋ| | ŋ|ʷ | ||||||||||
| ejective | central | ʧ’ | ||||||||||
| lateral | tɬ’ | cʎ̥’ | ||||||||||
| Fricative | central | f | s (z) | ʃ | ʜ | h | ||||||
| lateral | ɬ | ɬʷ | ʎ̥ | |||||||||
| Approximant | central | (j) | w | |||||||||
| lateral | l | |||||||||||
| Trill | r | |||||||||||
The prenasalized voiceless stops have been analysed as syllabic nasals plus stops by some researchers. However, one would expect this additional syllable to give Dahalo words additional tonic possibilities, as Dahalo pitch accent is syllable-dependent (see below), and Ladefoged reports that this does not seem to be the case.
When geminate, the epiglottals are a voiceless stop and fricative. (Thus /ʡ/ is not pharyngeal as sometimes reported, since pharyngeal stops are not believed to be possible.) In utterance-initial position they may be a partially voiced (negative voice onset time) stop and fricative. However, as singletons between vowels, /ʡ/ is a flap or even an approximant with weak voicing, while /ʜ/ is a fully voiced approximant. Other obstruents are similarly affected intervocalically, though not to the same degree.
[edit] Vowels
Dahalo has 10 vowels:
| Front | Back | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i / iː | u / uː | |
| Mid | e / eː | o / oː | |
| Low | a / aː | ||
Dahalo has both long and short vowels.
[edit] Syllable and phonotactics
Dahalo words are commonly 2-4 syllables long. Syllables are exclusively of the CV pattern, except that consonants may be geminate between vowels. As with many other Afro-Asiatic languages, gemination is grammatically productive. Voiced consonants partially devoice, and prenasalized stops denasalize when geminated as part of a grammitical function. However, lexical prenasalised geminate stops also occur.
(It is likely that the glottals and clicks do not occur as geminates, although only a few words with intervocalic clicks are known, such as /ʜáŋ̊|ana/.)
Dahalo has pitch accent, normally with zero to one high-pitched syllables (rarely more) per root word. If there is a high pitch, it is most frequently on the first syllable; in the case of disyllabic words, this is the only possibility: e.g. /ʡani/ head, /p’úʡʡu/ pierce.
[edit] Grammar
[edit] External links
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[edit] Bibliography
- Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (Ed.). (2005). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (15th ed.). Dallas, TX: SIL International. ISBN 1-55671-159-X. (Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com).
- Maddieson, Ian; Spajić, Siniša; Sands, Bonny; & Ladefoged, Peter. (1993). Phonetic structures of Dahalo. In I. Maddieson (Ed.), UCLA working papers in phonetics: Fieldwork studies of targeted languages (No. 84, pp. 25-65). Los Angeles: The UCLA Phonetics Laboratory Group.
