The Koti language, or ''Ekoti'' (pronounced ), is a
Bantu
Bantu may refer to:
*Bantu languages, constitute the largest sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages
*Bantu peoples, over 400 peoples of Africa speaking a Bantu language
* Bantu knots, a type of African hairstyle
*Black Association for National ...
language spoken in
Mozambique
Mozambique (), officially the Republic of Mozambique ( pt, Moçambique or , ; ny, Mozambiki; sw, Msumbiji; ts, Muzambhiki), is a country located in southeastern Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi ...
by about 64,200 people. Koti is spoken on Koti Island and is also the major language of
Angoche
Angoche is a district, city and municipality located in Nampula Province in north-eastern Mozambique. The district has limits in the North with Mogincual District, in the South with Larde District, to the east with the Indian Ocean and to the wes ...
, the capital of the district with the same name in the province of
Nampula
Nampula is the capital city of Nampula Province in Northern Mozambique. With a population of 743,125 (2017 census), it is the third-largest city in Mozambique after Maputo and Matola. The city is located in the interior of Nampula Province, approxi ...
.
In terms of genetic classification, Koti is generally considered to belong to the Makhuwa group (P.30 in
Guthrie's classification). A large portion of its vocabulary however derives from a past variety of
Swahili, today the lingua franca of much of East Africa's coast. This Swahili influence is usually attributed to traders from
Kilwa
Kilwa Kisiwani (English: ''Kilwa Island'') is an island, national historic site, and hamlet community located in the township of Kilwa Masoko, the district seat of Kilwa District in the Tanzanian region of Lindi Region in southern Tanzania. K ...
or elsewhere on the
Zanzibar
Zanzibar (; ; ) is an insular semi-autonomous province which united with Tanganyika in 1964 to form the United Republic of Tanzania. It is an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of the mainland, and consists of many small islands ...
Coast, who in the fifteenth century settled at Angoche. Arends et al. suggest it might turn out to be a Makhua–Swahili
mixed language
A mixed language is a language that arises among a bilingual group combining aspects of two or more languages but not clearly deriving primarily from any single language. It differs from a creole language, creole or pidgin, pidgin language in that ...
.
[Arends, Muysken, & Smith (1995), ''Pidgins and Creoles: An Introduction'']
Geography and demography
The place name ''Koti'' refers primarily to the island. An older form is ; this form with the class 2 nominal prefix ''a'' for 'people' gave rise to the Portuguese name ''Angoche''. The much older local African name of Angoche, still in use, is ''Parápaátho''. Angoche was probably established in the fifteenth century by dissidents from
Kilwa
Kilwa Kisiwani (English: ''Kilwa Island'') is an island, national historic site, and hamlet community located in the township of Kilwa Masoko, the district seat of Kilwa District in the Tanzanian region of Lindi Region in southern Tanzania. K ...
. In the centuries that followed, it flourished as a part of the Indian Ocean trading network.
About nine Koti villages are found in the coastal areas of Koti island; these are usually accessed by boat. Much of the coastline is covered by mangrove woods (''khava''). On the mainland, there are about five other Koti villages, all in the vicinity of Angoche. The main economic activity of men in the villages is fishing; the catch is sold on the markets of Angoche. People keep chickens and some goats.
In Makhuwa, the dominant regional language of much of northern Mozambique, the Koti are called ''Maka'', just like other coastal Muslim communities that were part of the Indian Ocean trading network. Most Koti have at least some knowledge of Makhuwa or one of its neighbouring dialects; this extensive bilinguality has had considerable influence on the Koti language in recent years.
Sounds
Vowels
Koti has five vowels. The open vowels and are normally written ''e'' and ''o''. The high vowels ''i'' and ''u'' do not occur word-initially. There is a restricted form of
vowel harmony
In phonology, vowel harmony is an Assimilation (linguistics), assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is t ...
in verbal bases which causes /u/ in verbal extensions to be rendered as
after another /o/; thus, the separative extensions ''-ul-'' and ''-uw-'' appear as ''-ol-'' and ''-ow-'' after the vowel ''o''. Furthermore, a distributional analysis shows that /o/ tends to occur mainly after another /o/, and only rarely after the other vowels.
Vowel length is contrastive in Koti, except in word-final position. Long vowels are best treated as two tone-bearing units. Several vowel coalescence processes do take place, within words as well as across morpheme boundaries: ''mathápá mawíxí apa'' → ''mathápá mawíx'áapa'' 'these green leaves' (the apostrophe shows the location of coalescence). In case of word-final 'i' it is sometimes accompanied with
glide formation
Glide may refer to:
* Gliding flight, to fly without thrust
Computing
*Glide API, a 3D graphics interface
* Glide OS, a web desktop
* Glide (software), an instant video messenger
*Glide, a molecular docking software by Schrödinger
Flight and m ...
: ''olíli áka'' → ''olíly'aáka'' 'my bed'.
Consonants
The table below shows the consonant inventory of Koti. The two glides ''w'' and ''y'' are only phonemically contrastive in certain contexts; in some other contexts, they can be derived from vowels. Consonants in parentheses are extremely rare, with the only example of ''dh'' in S&M's corpus, ''adhuhuri'' 'second prayer in the morning', being in variation with ''aduhuri''; the fricative ''zh'' occurs only in some recent loans from
Portuguese
Portuguese may refer to:
* anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal
** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods
** Portuguese language, a Romance language
*** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language
** Portu ...
. Voiced stops are rather infrequent overall, and they tend to occur after a homorganic, tone-bearing nasal. Additionally, voiced stops often vary with their voiceless unaspirated counterparts.
Words in Koti show incompatibility of aspirated consonants; this phenomenon is dubbed ''
Katupha's Law'' in Schadeberg (1999), and is found in related Makhuwa languages as well. If two aspirated consonants are brought together in one stem, the first such consonant loses its aspiration. The effect is particularly clear in reduplicated words: ''kopikophi'' 'eyelash'; ''piriphiri'' 'pepper' (cf. Swahili 'piripiri'); ''okukuttha'' 'to wipe'.
Another incompatibility concerns dental and retroflex consonants, which never occur together within a stem, and usually assimilate when brought together. Consider the class 1 demonstrative for example: ''o-tthu-o-tu'' becomes ''othuutu'' under influence of the dentral-retroflex incompatibility.
Tone
Koti, like most Bantu languages, is a register tone language with two tones: High and Low. Tone is not lexically distinctive for verbs, but it is very important in verbal inflection and in some other parts of grammar. Contour tones (falling and rising tones) do occur, but only on long vowels, therefore they are analysed as sequences of the H and L level tones. There is a process of High Doubling which spreads any H tone to the following tone bearing unit, and a process of Final Lowering which deletes any utterance-final High tone. Both can be seen in effect in the following example (Low tone is unmarked): ''kaláwa'' 'boat', ''kaláwá khuúlu'' 'the biggest boat'. In ''kaláwa'', High doubling is canceled because Final Lowering applies, so the last syllable has a Low tone. In the second example, the first H tone in ''kaláwá'' has spread to the next syllable (High Doubling) and Final Lowering again causes the last syllable of the utterance to be Low in tone.
Morphosyntax
Koti has a typical Bantu
noun class
In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...
system, in which every noun belongs to a nominal class which class markers throughout the sentence are in agreement with. Classes pair up in 'genders' for the derivation of plurals. Verbal words consist of a ''stem'' to which various morphemes and clitics can be affixed.
Notes
# Mucanheia 1997 as cited in Schadeberg & Mucanheia (henceforth S&M) 2000:4.
# S&M, p. 7 cite Newitt 1995 as saying that these traders, probably from Kilwa, established Angoche; however, they do not exclude the possibility of a much earlier Swahili settlement in Angoche.
# See note 2 above.
# S&M, 17-8.
# S&M, 19.
# Adapted from S&M, 10. Symbols are given according to the orthography used in S&M;
IPA
IPA commonly refers to:
* India pale ale, a style of beer
* International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation
* Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound
IPA may also refer to:
Organizations International
* Insolvency Practitioners ...
transcriptions are provided where the symbols differ from their IPA value. Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents the voiced consonant.
References
References
*
Schadeberg, Thilo C. (1999) 'Katupha's Law in Makhuwa', in ''Bantu historical linguistics: Theoretical and empirical perspectives'', ed. by J.-M. Hombert and L.M. Hyman. Stanford: CSLI, pp. 379–394.
*Schadeberg, Thilo C. & Mucanheia, Francisco Ussene (2000) ''Ekoti: The Maka or Swahili language of Angoche''. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.
External links
Alphabet and pronunciation
{{DEFAULTSORT:Koti Language
Makua languages
Languages of Mozambique