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Maban Language
The Maban languages are a small family of languages which have been included in the proposed Nilo-Saharan family. Maban languages are spoken in eastern Chad, the Central African Republic and western Sudan ( Darfur). Languages The Maban branch includes the following languages: *Mimi of Nachtigal * Kenjeje (Yaali, Faranga) * Masalit: Surbakhal, Masalit * Aiki (Runga and Kibet, sometimes considered separate languages) * Mabang: Karanga, Marfa, Maba The languages attested in two word lists labelled " Mimi", collected by Decorse (Mimi-D) and Nachtigal ( Mimi-N), have also been classified as Maban, though this has been contested. Mimi-N appears to have been remotely related to Maban proper, while Mimi-D appears to have not been Maban at all, with the similarities due to language contact with locally dominant Maba. Blench (2021) gives the following classification: *Proto-Maban **? Mimi of Nachtigal **Aiki-Kibet *** Aiki (= Runga) ***Kibet **core branch *** Kendeje ***Masalit, S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nilo-Saharan Languages
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50–60 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari River, Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. The languages extend through 17 nations in the northern half of Africa: from Algeria to Benin in the west; from Libya to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the centre; and from Egypt to Tanzania in the east. As indicated by its hyphenated name, Nilo-Saharan is a family of the African interior, including the greater Nile Basin and the Central Sahara Desert. Eight of its proposed constituent divisions (excluding Kunama languages, Kunama, Kuliak, and Songhai languages, Songhay) are found in the modern countries of Sudan and South Sudan, through which the Nile River flows. In his book ''The Languages of Africa'' (1963), Joseph Greenberg named the group and argued it was a genetic (linguistics), genetic family. It contains the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maban Languages
The Maban languages are a small family of languages which have been included in the proposed Nilo-Saharan family. Maban languages are spoken in eastern Chad, the Central African Republic and western Sudan ( Darfur). Languages The Maban branch includes the following languages: *Mimi of Nachtigal * Kenjeje (Yaali, Faranga) * Masalit: Surbakhal, Masalit * Aiki (Runga and Kibet, sometimes considered separate languages) * Mabang: Karanga, Marfa, Maba The languages attested in two word lists labelled " Mimi", collected by Decorse (Mimi-D) and Nachtigal ( Mimi-N), have also been classified as Maban, though this has been contested. Mimi-N appears to have been remotely related to Maban proper, while Mimi-D appears to have not been Maban at all, with the similarities due to language contact with locally dominant Maba. Blench (2021) gives the following classification: *Proto-Maban **? Mimi of Nachtigal **Aiki-Kibet *** Aiki (= Runga) ***Kibet **core branch *** Kendeje ***Masalit, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Northern Eastern Sudanic Languages
The Northern Eastern Sudanic, Eastern ''k'' Sudanic, ''Ek'' Sudanic, NNT or Astaboran languages may form a primary division of the yet-to-be-demonstrated Eastern Sudanic family. They are characterised by having a / k/ in the first person singular pronoun "I/me", as opposed to the Southern Eastern Sudanic languages, which have an / n/. Nyima has yet to be conclusively linked to the other languages, and would appear to be the closest relative of ''Ek'' Sudanic rather than ''Ek'' Sudanic proper. The most well-known language of this group is Nubian. According to Claude Rilly, the ancient Meroitic language appears on limited evidence to be closest to languages of this group. A reconstruction of Proto-Northern Eastern Sudanic has also been proposed by Rilly (2010: 347-349). Internal classification Rilly (2009:2)Rilly, Claude. 2009. ''From the Yellow Nile to the Blue Nile: The quest for water and the diffusion of Northern East Sudanic languages from the fourth to the first millennia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chad
Chad (; ar, تشاد , ; french: Tchad, ), officially the Republic of Chad, '; ) is a landlocked country at the crossroads of North and Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon to the southwest, Nigeria to the southwest (at Lake Chad), and Niger to the west. Chad has a population of 16 million, of which 1.6 million live in the capital and largest city of N'Djamena. Chad has several regions: a desert zone in the north, an arid Sahelian belt in the centre and a more fertile Sudanian Savanna zone in the south. Lake Chad, after which the country is named, is the second-largest wetland in Africa. Chad's official languages are Arabic and French. It is home to over 200 different ethnic and linguistic groups. Islam (55.1%) and Christianity (41.1%) are the main religions practiced in Chad. Beginning in the 7th millennium BC, human populations moved into the Chadian basin in great numbe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eastern Sudanic Languages
In most classifications, the Eastern Sudanic languages are a group of nine families of languages that may constitute a branch of the Nilo-Saharan language family. Eastern Sudanic languages are spoken from southern Egypt to northern Tanzania. Nubian (and possibly Meroitic) gives Eastern Sudanic some of the earliest written attestations of African languages. However, the largest branch by far is Nilotic, spread by extensive and comparatively recent conquests throughout East Africa. Before the spread of Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic was centered in present-day Sudan. The name "East Sudanic" refers to the eastern part of the region of Sudan where the country of Sudan is located, and contrasts with Central Sudanic and Western Sudanic (modern Mande, in the Niger–Congo family). Lionel Bender (1980) proposes several Eastern Sudanic isoglosses (defining words), such as ''*kutuk'' "mouth", ''*(ko)TVS-(Vg)'' "three", and ''*ku-lug-ut'' or ''*kVl(t)'' "fish". In older classifications, s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Languages Of Chad
Chad has two official languages, Arabic and French, and over 120 indigenous languages. A vernacular version of Arabic, Chadian Arabic, is a lingua franca and the language of commerce, spoken by 40-60% of the population. The two official languages have fewer speakers than Chadian Arabic. Standard Arabic is spoken by around 615,000 speakers. French is widely spoken in the main cities such as N'Djamena and by most men in the south of the country. Most schooling is in French. The language with the most first-language speakers is probably Ngambay, with around one million speakers. Chad submitted an application to join the Arab League as a member state on 25 March 2014, which is still pending.Middle East Monitor''South Sudan and Chad apply to join the Arab League'' 12 April 2014, retrieved 6 May 2017 Chadian Sign Language is actually Nigerian Sign Language, a dialect of American Sign Language; Andrew Foster introduced ASL in the 1960s, and Chadian teachers for the deaf train i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Language Families
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the ''daughter languages'' within a language family as being ''genetically related''. According to ''Ethnologue'' there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families. A living language is defined as one that is the first language of at least one person. The language families with the most speakers are: the Indo-European family, with many widely spoken languages native to Europe (such as English and Spanish) and South Asia (such as Hindi and Bengali); and the Sino-Tibetan fa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fur Language
The Fur language (or For; Fur: ''bèle fòòr'' or ''fòòraŋ bèle''; ar, فوراوي, ''Fûrâwî''; sometimes called Konjara by linguists, after a former ruling clan) is a Nilo-Saharan language spoken by the Fur of Darfur in Western Sudan. It is part of a broader family of languages known as the Fur languages. Phonology The consonantal phonemes are: All sounds are spelt with their IPA symbols except for the following: ''j'' = , ''ñ'' = and ''y'' = . Arabic consonants are sometimes used in loanwords. The vowels are as in Latin: ''a e i o u''. There is dispute as to whether the –ATR vowels are phonetic variants or separate phonemes. There are two underlying tonemes, ''L'' (low) and ''H'' (high); phonetically, ''L'', ''H'', ''mid'', ''HL'', and ''LH'' are all found. Metathesis is an extremely common and regular grammatical phenomenon in Fur: when a consonant pronoun prefix is prefixed to a verb that begins with a consonant, either the verb's first consonant is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kibet Language
Aiki is a Maban language of Chad Chad (; ar, تشاد , ; french: Tchad, ), officially the Republic of Chad, '; ) is a landlocked country at the crossroads of North and Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic .... It consists of two dialects, Runga and Kibet, which are divergent enough to be considered separate languages. Kibet (Kibeit, Kibeet, Kabentang) is spoken in Chad, while Runga (Roungo) is split between Chad and the CAR. Ayki (Aykindang) is a name used in CAR. Possible dialects of Kibet are Dagal (Dagel, Daggal) and Muru (Murru, Muro, Mourro);Pierre Nougayrol (1989) ''La langue des Aiki dits Rounga'' however, they are poorly known, and Blench (2012) lists them separately. The Aiki area is flooded half the year. References Maban languages Languages of Chad {{ns-lang-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Advanced Tongue Root
In phonetics, advanced tongue root (ATR) and retracted tongue root (RTR) are contrasting states of the root of the tongue during the pronunciation of vowels in some languages, especially in Western and Eastern Africa, but also in Kazakh and Mongolian. ATR vs RTR was once suggested to be the basis for the distinction between tense and lax vowels in European languages such as German, but that no longer seems tenable. Advanced tongue root Advanced tongue root, abbreviated ATR or +ATR, also called expanded, involves the expansion of the pharyngeal cavity by moving the base of the tongue forward and often lowering the larynx during the pronunciation of a vowel. The lowering of the larynx sometimes adds a breathy quality to the vowel. Voiced stops such as can often involve non-contrastive tongue root advancement whose results can be seen occasionally in sound changes relating stop voicing and vowel frontness such as voicing stop consonants before front vowels in the Oghuz Tur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Songhay Languages
The Songhay, Songhai or Ayneha languages (, or ) are a group of closely related languages/dialects centred on the middle stretches of the Niger River in the West African countries of Mali, Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso and Nigeria. In particular, they are spoken in the cities of Timbuktu, Niamey and Gao. They have been widely used as a ''lingua franca'' in that region ever since the era of the Songhai Empire. In Mali, the government has officially adopted the dialect of Gao (east of Timbuktu) as the dialect to be used as a medium of primary education. Some Songhay languages have little to no mutual intelligibility between each other. For example, Koyraboro Senni, spoken in Gao, is unintelligible to speakers of Zarma in Niger, according to ''Ethnologue''. However, Songhoyboro Ciine, Zarma, and Dendi have high mutual intelligibility within Niger. For linguists, a major point of interest in the Songhay languages has been the difficulty of determining their genetic affiliation; they ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
