The Sucite language or Sicite is a Senufo language spoken in southwestern

Burkina Faso Burkina Faso (, ; , ff, 𞤄𞤵𞤪𞤳𞤭𞤲𞤢 𞤊𞤢𞤧𞤮, italic=no) is a landlocked country in West Africa with an area of , bordered by Mali to the northwest, Niger to the northeast, Benin to the southeast, Togo and Ghana t ...

and

Mali Mali (; ), officially the Republic of Mali,, , ff, 𞤈𞤫𞤲𞥆𞤣𞤢𞥄𞤲𞤣𞤭 𞤃𞤢𞥄𞤤𞤭, Renndaandi Maali, italics=no, ar, جمهورية مالي, Jumhūriyyāt Mālī is a landlocked country in West Africa. Ma ...

by approximately 35,000 people. Sucite is a close neighbour of the

Supyire language Supyire, or Suppire, is a Senufo language spoken in the Sikasso Region of southeastern Mali and in adjoining regions of Ivory Coast. In their native language, the noun means both "the people" and "the language spoken by the people". Backgroun ...

, spoken in southeastern Mali. Sucite is sometimes regarded as the northern extension of the Supyire language. The two dialects are, according to Garber (1987), ‘quite mutually intelligible’. Sometimes speakers of Sucite will even refer to themselves as speaking Supyire. Another closely related lect is Mamara (also known as Minyanka). Some other Senufo groups refers to the Sùcìté people as Tagba, because they live on the Tagouara plateau. There are various ways to spell the dialect names. Variants of Sucite include Sicite, Sipiite, and Sicire. The SIL language code is SEP.

Sounds

Vowels

All vowels can be lengthened and

nasalized In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internationa ...

. The schwa /ə/ is included in brackets because it is found only in two specific environments, where it appears to be in

complementary distribution In linguistics, complementary distribution, as distinct from contrastive distribution and free variation, is the relationship between two different elements of the same kind in which one element is found in one set of environments and the other ele ...

with some other vowel.

Consonants

Geminate voiced stops/affricates are cognate to prenasalized voiceless stops in Supyire, and are indicated orthographically as in Garber (1987).

Tone

Sucite is a

tonal language Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...

with three surface tone levels: High, Mid, and Low. Garber (1987) and Carlson (1994) analyse the Northern Senufo system as having two different Mid tones, a strong mid (Ms) and a weak mid (Mw). The Ms tone undergoes substantially less tonal alternations than the Mw tone. Garber (1988) suggests that this peculiarity may have its origin in a tonal split. Glides formed by combining pairs of tones exist, the most common being HL and ML.

Grammar

Nouns

Like the other Senufo languages, Sucite employs a noun class system of five genders: three pairings of singular/plural classes and two mass/collective classes. Nouns take class-specific suffixes for definiteness. For example: Garber 1987, pp. 25-26.

Pronouns

Each noun class has its own set of pronouns. These may be general (clitic), emphatic,

partitive In linguistics, the partitive is a word, phrase, or case that indicates partialness. Nominal partitives are syntactic constructions, such as "some of the children", and may be classified semantically as either set partitives or entity partitives ba ...

, interrogative, demonstrative, or relative.

References

Sources

*Carlson, Robert (1994) ''A Grammar of Suppyire''. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. *Garber, Anne (1980) 'Word order change and the Senufo languages.' In ''Studies in the Linguistic Sciences'', 10, 1, 45-57. *Garber, Anne (1987) ''A Tonal Analysis of Senufo: Sucite dialect (Gur; Burkina Faso)''. PhD dissertation, Urbana: University of Illinois / Ann Arbor: UMI

*Garber, Anne (1988) 'A double tiered analysis of Sicite tone'. In ''Journal of West African languages'', 18, 2, 21-33.