Buwal, also known as Ma Buwal, Bual, or Gadala, is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in

Cameroon Cameroon (; french: Cameroun, ff, Kamerun), officially the Republic of Cameroon (french: République du Cameroun, links=no), is a country in west-central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west and north; Chad to the northeast; the C ...

Far North Province The Far North Region, also known as the Extreme North Region (from french: Région de l'Extrême-Nord), is the northernmost constituent province of the Republic of Cameroon. It borders the North Region to the south, Chad to the east, and Ni ...

in and around

Gadala Gadala is a part of Rajahmundry Municipal Corporation in East Godavari district of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It was merged into the corporation on 18 March 2013, alongside 21 panchayats The Panchayat raj is a political system, ...

Phonology

The

labiodental flap In phonetics, the voiced labiodental flap is a speech sound found primarily in languages of Central Africa, such as Kera and Mangbetu. It has also been reported in the Austronesian language Sika. It is one of the few non- rhotic flaps. The ...

is marginal, only occurring in two native Buwal words. The labial-velar plosives are also marginal; in particular, only occurs in one word, the

ideophone Ideophone is a word class evoking ideas in sound imitation or onomatopoeia to express action, manner of property. Ideophone is the least common syntactic category cross-linguistically occurring mostly in African, Australian and Amerindian langua ...

. Buwal has the vowels , which can occur in high, middle, or low tone. Each vowel has a variety of phonetic realizations. can occur as , and can occur as . The schwa can be analyzed as a solely

epenthetic vowel In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the beginning syllable ('' prothesis'') or in the ending syllable (''paragoge'') or in-between two syllabic sounds in a word. The word ''epenth ...

. These vowels occur as rounded

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...

s when adjacent to a labialized consonant, and as front vowels when the word is palatalized. Palatalization in Buwal occurs across an entire word, and also affects the affricate consonants , which surface as in a palatalized word. As a result, all of the vowels within a single word are either front or back, producing

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is an 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 typically long distance, mea ...

. An example of this contrast is between 'rat' (underlyingly ), which is non-palatalized, and (underlyingly ) 'turtle', which is palatalized. This process does not affect loanwords, e.g. 'oil' (from

Fulfulde Fula ,Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student’s Handbook'', Edinburgh also known as Fulani or Fulah (, , ; Adlam: , , ), is a Senegambian language spoken by around 30 million people as a set of various dialects in a continuum that st ...

) or 'school' (from French ). Some loanwords have been modified to accommodate Buwal phonology, e.g. 'tea', from Fulfulde .

Notes

Biu-Mandara languages Languages of Cameroon Vertical vowel systems {{Cameroon-stub