The Qimant language is a highly
endangered language
An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...
spoken by a small and elderly fraction of the
Qemant
The Qemant (also known as western Agaws) are a small ethnic group in northwestern Ethiopia specifically in Gondar, Amhara Region. The Qemant people traditionally practiced an early Pagan-Hebraic religion, however most members of the Qemant are ...
people in northern
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...
, mainly in the
Chilga
Chilga (Amharic: ጭልጋ ''č̣ilgā'') also Chelga, Ch'ilga is a woreda in Amhara Region, Ethiopia. It is named after its chief town Chilga (also known as Ayikel), an important stopping point on the historic Gondar- Sudan trade route. Part o ...
woreda
Districts of Ethiopia, also called woredas ( am, ወረዳ; ''woreda''), are the third level of the administrative divisions of Ethiopia – after ''zones'' and the '' regional states''.
These districts are further subdivided into a number of ...
in
Semien Gondar Zone between
Gondar
Gondar, also spelled Gonder (Amharic: ጎንደር, ''Gonder'' or ''Gondär''; formerly , ''Gʷandar'' or ''Gʷender''), is a city and woreda in Ethiopia. Located in the North Gondar Zone of the Amhara Region, Gondar is north of Lake Tana on t ...
and
Metemma.
Classifications
The language belongs to the western branch of the Agaw or
Central Cushitic languages. Other (extinct) members of this branch are
Qwara and
Kayla. Along with all other
Cushitic languages, Qimant belongs to the
Afro-Asiatic language family
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 h ...
.
Geographic distribution and sociolinguistic situation
Qimant is the original language of the
Qemant
The Qemant (also known as western Agaws) are a small ethnic group in northwestern Ethiopia specifically in Gondar, Amhara Region. The Qemant people traditionally practiced an early Pagan-Hebraic religion, however most members of the Qemant are ...
people of
Semien Gondar Zone and
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...
. Although the ethnic population of the Qemant was 172,327 at the 1994 census, only a very small fraction of these speak the language nowadays. All speakers live either in
Chilga
Chilga (Amharic: ጭልጋ ''č̣ilgā'') also Chelga, Ch'ilga is a woreda in Amhara Region, Ethiopia. It is named after its chief town Chilga (also known as Ayikel), an important stopping point on the historic Gondar- Sudan trade route. Part o ...
woreda or in
Lay Armachiho woreda. The number of first-language speakers is 1625, the number of second language speakers 3450. All speakers of the language are older than 30 years, and more than 75% are older than 50 years. The language is no longer passed on to the next generation of speakers. Most ethnic Qemant people speak
Amharic. Qimant is not spoken in public or even at house as a means of day communication any more, but is reduced to a secret code.
Dialects/Varieties
It is not clear to what extent
Kayla,
Qwara and Qimant have been dialects of the same Western Agaw language, or were languages distinct from each other.
Phonology
Consonants
Continuants can be geminated word-medially.
Vowels
Phonotactics
The maximum
syllable structure
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological " ...
in Qimant is CVC, which implies that
consonant cluster
In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...
s are only allowed word-medially. In loanwords from Amharic there may also be consonant-clusters within a syllable. Vowel clusters are not allowed.
Phonological processes
Consonant cluster
In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...
s with more than two consonants are broken up by inserting the
epenthetic vowel . Other phonological processes are
nasal assimilation and
devoicing of at word boundaries.
Prosody
The prosodic features of Qimant have not been studied yet.
Grammar
Morphology
The personal marking system distinguishes between first person singular and plural, second person singular, polite, and plural, and third person masculine, feminine and plural. On the verb, all inflectional categories are marked by suffixes. Zelealem (2003, p. 192) identifies three different aspect forms in Qimant: Perfective, Imperfective and Progressive. Like in other
Central Cushitic languages, the numbers one to nine go back to an ancient
quinary
Quinary (base-5 or pental) is a numeral system with 5 (number), five as the radix, base. A possible origination of a quinary system is that there are five finger, digits on either hand.
In the quinary place system, five numerals, from 0 (number) ...
system, where the suffix added to the numbers two to four results in the numbers six to nine (2-4 are three numbers, 6-9 are four numbers).
Syntax[Zelealem 2003, p. 252-262]
The basic constituent order in Qimant, like in all other Afro-Asiatic languages of Ethiopia, is SOV. The presence of a
case marking system allows for other, more marked orders. In the
noun phrase
In linguistics, a noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently oc ...
the
head noun
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for:
* Living creatures (including people, alive, ...
follows its modifiers. Numbers, however, can also follow the head noun. All kind of
subordinate clauses precede the
main verb
A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual desc ...
of the sentence.
Vocabulary
As a consequence of the looming language death, many items of the vocabulary are already replaced by
Amharic words.
References
* Zelealem Leyew. 2003. ''The Kemantney Language – A Sociolinguistic and Grammatical Study of Language Replacement''. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
* David L. Appleyard. 1975. "A descriptive outline of Kemant," ''Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies'' 38:316-350.
Notes
External links
Qimant phonology and grammar*
World Atlas of Language Structures
The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials. It was first published by Oxford University Press as a book with CD-RO ...
information o
Kemant
{{Authority control
Central Cushitic languages
Languages of Ethiopia
Amhara Region
Endangered languages of Africa